Streaming Live Video With VLC Media Player

YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe and sites alike made video one of the big players of the web. The great thing about those sites is that you are no longer just a viewer but are able to create your own videos and share them to the world. Many bloggers changed their regular posts and replaced them with video casts. Everybody started creating videos all around the globe. I did this myself! But now creating a video and uploading it to YouTube is getting old, specially when you can broadcast yourself live!

There are many ways to streaming live videos. There are sites specially suited for this task, sites like livestream.com and ustream.tv. To broadcast on those sites you just need to create an account and upload your live feed to them. They then serve your stream live to the whole world. Those sites are great, they are free and they serve the video stream into a flash container so anyone with a flash player available can watch it, that means anyone using Windows, Linux, Mac OS X or many smartphones.

Another way is using a dedicated streaming server. Again there are many options but the most popular are Flash Media Server, Wowza and Red5. The three are flash servers and the three are being widely used. The best is Flash Media Server, wich is from Adobe the creators of the RTMP protocol (although the specification of the protocol is now for public use) but Flash Media Server is the most expensive too. The only of the three I have tried is Red5 wich is free and also opensource. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X so there's a flavor for any user. It's really tricky and it can get real hard to make it stream live video. The one thing that it does with no problem is streaming video from files so is great to stream pre-recorded videocast.

I have found that there is one last option to stream live video. That's the Vlc Media Player. In my opinion VLC is the best media player that exists, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, it's free and it has a very active development. The thing that make this player the best out there is that it includes just about any codec (for both video and audio) that you would ever need. But it's not just a media player, it stream audio and video in many different codecs and containers. I have used it many times to stream video to the web using windows media video and audio codecs using the RTSP protocol. That stream can be viewed on any media player (like the most obvious: Windows Media Player), but I don't really like the fact that to see the stream a media player needed to be embedded on a web page because it made that solution very platform dependent. But VLC can stream video to flash players just like YouTube does!

To stream video using VLC all you need is a live video feed (e.g. a webcam) and a microphone (e.g. the one that comes with your USB webcam). The setup I use is VLC on it's latest version (wich right now is 1.1.5) streaming video over the HTTP protocol on an MP4 container using H.264 as video codec and MP3 as the one for the audio. That way a flash media player like Flowplayer or JW Player can be used to watch the stream. That setup is the only one that works for a flash media player, so if you are planning to stream and want to have a broad audience go with it.

Live video streaming will be around us for many years and sure VLC won't be the only media player with streaming capabilities but right now is the one that makes it the easiest.