Free video streaming software for inside the firewall?
March 21, 2010 6:01 PM   Subscribe

At my company, we recently started recording our internal talks/seminars. I want to set it up so that people can watch these later directly through their web browser. So, basically, looking for self-hosted video streaming server software (kind of like a YouTube/Vimeo from inside the firewall). Are there free alternatives to Adobe Flash Media Server? I'm currently looking at Apache with the h264 Streaming Module and JW Player. But is there anything that just works seamlessly? Copy an .MP4 file to a directory, give it a name in a form and a URL is generated for you?
posted by miasma to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
You could open a separate YouTube account and make the videos private to your co-workers. (Disclaimer: , I downloaded a video marked private and it was not visable to the public, but never opened it to friends via YouTube. I did embed it on my Web site for a while, which could be another option...)
posted by srbrunson at 6:17 PM on March 21, 2010


Response by poster: @srbrunson Thanks for the suggestion, but we definitely want to keep this behind the firewall and not use a hosted solution outside of our own network
posted by miasma at 6:28 PM on March 21, 2010


miasma, we've been doing this for a couple months now. I was really big into keeping it within my firewall. Originally we used VLC which required that the user also have VLC, which isn't too bad because VLC is awesome and lightweight. We provided links on a site. Sort of ghetto, I admit, but I didn't find anything as you would describe, seamless, and it wasn't high on my agenda.

One thing I didn't anticipate, which I kind of knew in the back of my head, bandwidth requirements for video will kill you. More than 3-4 concurrent connections outside our local network and we were hosed, and we have a fairly expensive fiber connection.

Instead we moved to Google Apps Premier, which allows you to upload private videos, with a nice interface. I don't think you can make videos public, even if you wanted to.

But do realize that hosting videos is very bandwidth and CPU intensive, the former being the more expensive of the two.
posted by geoff. at 7:23 PM on March 21, 2010


Red5 is an open source alternative to Flash PLayer that's in Beta.

http://osflash.org/red5

Wowza Media Server isn't open source, but it can be cheaper.

http://www.wowzamedia.com/
posted by advicepig at 7:12 AM on March 22, 2010


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