External, stand-alone player such as Windows Media Player, Real's player, and Apple's QuickTime require a user to enter the address of a stream to view it. This adds complexity that most users don't need! Launching an external player directly from a URL is easy, but it depends on the server reporting the right mime type. Video in a web page provides great flexibility...you can easily customize the graphics that might wrap around a player, add text and links, adjust the size, and perform advanced functions.
It is easy to view video over the Internet directly from the VBrick Windows Media encoding appliance! In this brief tutorial, we will use Windows Media Player embedded in a web page.
Windows Media Player is already installed on most Microsoft Windows computers. By its nature, if the player is present it can be embedded in a web page.
The URL for VBrick WM video can be "rtsp", "rtspu", "rtspt", or "http". You can also use the old "mms", but this has fallen out of common use.
It is always best to send video via UDP because it is more efficient. But today's networks have so many firewalls that block all UDP, you will want to use HTTP streaming if you wish to ensure your video can be viewed without your viewers having to modify default firewall settings.
VBrick appliances are shipped configured with the management interface exposed on port 80, and the video exposed on port 8080. These ports are commonly "swapped" so that the the video can be streamed on port 80 (this is done via "configure / system / security" in the VBrick). In the following examples, it is assumed the video is streamed on port 80, otherwise you will need to include :8080 after the IP address.
You will use "rtsp" or "mms" to view the live WMV directly from the WM VBrick appliance's server. Cut and paste the following to your web page, and modify the URL value to your VBrick IP address:
You can easily script the player, allowing the user to select videos, set preferences, etc. Here is an example of a player with external buttons and a dropdown selection list. Cut and paste this into a web page. Change the option values to your VBrick IP addresses and stream names. Please note that this works in IE only:
One VBrick can webcast up to 200 simultaneous viewers on the public Internet, up to a total of about 50 Mbps. If your audio/video is set to 300 Kbps, ten viewers will require 3000 Kbps (3 Mbps) and 100 viewers will require 30000 Kbps (30 Mbps). This may be more Internet access bandwidth than you have available. If so, you may send your video to a "reflector" (see below).
The VBrick appliance allows you to limit the number of viewers. You can do this by setting the maximum number of simultaneous viewers or the maximum allowable bandwidth. Viewers that exceed this setting will be denied access and your web page might simply warn: "If you cannot view the video, the system may be at capacity. Please try again later".
A VBrick appliance is not just an "encoder"...it is a full multifunction server! As with any server, it must be accessible to the clients it seeks to serve. Therefore, if you wish to deliver audio/video from a VBrick directly to Internet clients, the VBrick must be on an "outside" address, or NAT'ed to an outside address. VBrick appliances are not Windows or Linux servers!! They are virtually immune to viruses or worms and are very safe to locate on an outside address (although you will want to give them a strong username/password).
You can build and upload web pages directly to your VBrick server and allow it to deliver the viewing pages directly. There are example pages and instructions on www.videoalive.com.
Rather than serving viewers directly from the VBrick appliance, you can send one stream to a reflector server and have that reflector server deliver the streams to your viewers. The advantage of this approach is that you do not need high bandwidth at your encoding location. Another important advantage is that your source VBrick does not need to be on an "outside" address and my be NAT'ed.
You can host your own reflector server by configuring Windows Media Server (an included option for Windows standard and enterprise edition servers). Obviously, your reflector server must have adequate bandwidth to deliver (reflect) streams your desired number of viewers. You can configure your VBrick to "push" the video to the server, or configure the server to "pull" the video from the VBrick.
Reflector service is available from PowerStream (http://vbrick.powerstream.net). Their servers have very high speed Internet access and they provide excellent service. This is a very cost-effective and convenient service to deliver video to thousands of viewers on the public Internet. VBrick provides prepaid Inteneet reflector service for certain packages.
Getting Windows Media Player to run in FireFox or on a MAC with Safari is a little bit tricky. The viewer's desktop must manually download and install the player (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/download/). The following illustrates how to code the player for use with these browsers:
Internet Explorer & FireFox
The following illustrates how to code your player so that it is works will with most PC's running virtually any version of Windows: