After attending Thomas Vander Stichele’s Flumotion talk at LUGRadio Live 2007 and being suitably impressed, I figured I’d give it a go – partly because it looked cool and partly because I didn’t believe for a second that I could set up a server to compress and stream video and audio data with only a few clicks in the real-world. I am also well aware of how buggy GStreamer (on which it is based) has been when I’ve tried to use it for real-world projects in the past and was not convinced all the features flumotion requires would actually function as expected.
Well, it seems that actually you can get streaming going with a few clicks. After installing the flumotion package in Debian Lenny it was simply a case of running ‘flumotion-admin’ and working through the simple wizard, selecting my super-cheap webcam as the video source and OGG Theora as the codec. After that was done, I simply pointed VLC at the stream and off it went (you can of course use any media player you want, as long as it can handle HTTP streams and the codec you’re streaming in). It literally took about two minutes to get going. I did have to add the ‘flumotion’ user to the ‘video’ group so that it could access the webcam device, but this is a packaging issue rather than a flumotion one.
With my crappy webcam I can get a good enough picture using only 64Kbit/s of bandwidth. Possibly some tweaking could get it even lower, but it depends on the codec. It would be interesting to see how the BBC’s Dirac codec would perform in this environment. Capturing from my webcam (at low resolution) and encoding as Theora uses about 27% of CPU at 1GHz (no, I don’t really have such an old CPU – that’s reduced with frequency scaling in order to save power).
One irritating problem is that you can set up a stream, but as soon as the flumotion server is restarted it completely forgets about it, so all streams are forgotten each time you reboot. Probably I am missing something, but I can’t see an obvious way around this at the moment. Anyway, flumotion is pretty cool and it looks like finally, thanks to GStreamer, Linux’s lack of decent easy-to-use multimedia applications is starting to get fixed. Well done Fluendo for making this happen.
