It has been CRAZY the last few days.
Was playing with video streaming all last week. I wanted to be ready if graduation was going to be web casted. My first attempt at streaming was successful by carefully following the directions. I used Sorenson Broadcaster 1.1 on an iMac with a DV camera connected to it in the office. I was going to put it on the G4, but it was busy computer in the office. I didn’t have direct access to the Server Emmanuel used to stream last graduation with, so I decided to download Darwin Streaming server for linux and install it on Domino. Installation and configuration is pretty much effortless, as you would expect from an Apple product. Big ups to
Apple. 
I configured Domino to stream on port 80 for those behind firewalls. After creating the SDP file on the iMac, I SCP’ed it to Domino in the /usr/loca/movies folder. Following the directions in the Sorenson manual, I went over to the G4, loaded the QuickTime Player and typed in rtsp://domino.dhs.org/movie in the open URL dialog box. After I clicked ok, it began to stream, but I wanted to put this in a html document. I read further… While the streaming was going on in the QuickTime Player, I went file and save movie. This is necessary if you want to embed the stream in a html document. I selected self-contained movie as per direction. From the G4, I SCP’ed the test.mov file over to the root of my virutal web server, megaduce. There I created a simple html document that contained:
<html>
<body>
<center>
<embed src=”test_movie.mov” width=”320″ height=”240″ target=”QuickTimePlayer”>
</center>
</body>
</html>
After that, I went around the office that had QuickTime installed and fired up IE and pointed it to movie.html on my box. It worked!!! Now to see if it worked off campus. It was impractical to run home at the moment to test, so I launched MSN and AOL Messenger to find someone. I found a few, none of them could see it. Then Emmanuel came online. I asked him to pull it up. Strangely, he pulled it up. Baffled and tired, I decided to go home and rest and ask Geoff about it in the morning.
The next day rolled around and I talked to Geoff about the problem. He told me that the firewall (WatchGuard FireBox II) was not configured to allow rtsp protocols through which was port 554. And I was like, yeah and I have the box configured to use port 80, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I had some people try to connect again, and we would monitor the results on some monitoring program for the FireBox. True enough people were trying to get in on port 554 and were being denied by the firewall. Luckily, Emmanuel logged on while I was running back and forth between my computer and the server room. I got him to connect and I saw on the firewall that he was able to get through…. ON PORT 80. I told him the situation and he said that he automatically had this QuickTime Player to play on port 80. DUH. So then it hit me. What if I put: rtsp://domino.dhs.org:80/movie instead of rtsp://domino.dhs.org/movie when I opened the URL stream in QuickTime Player. I SCP’ed the new movie.mov file over to my web box and VOILA!!!! People off campus can see it now! I was happy and I felt like I accomplished something. If only EE and Calculus came to me that easy.
*SIGH*
More later ….
