How Can I Stream Videos?

Question

Basically I have a personal websever setup with many videos due to the fact that I like to watch these videos in many different places. However, as of right now, I have to go to the dirrect filepath of the mediafile and wait for it to completely finish downloading. Is there anyway I can instead just stream the video from my webserver? I have a basic understanding in PHP and some knowledge in C# aswell.

Is there anything that can make this as easy as possible? Maybe an already built system to do this for me?

Thanks

Answer 1

Streaming means, that you use a streaming protocol (like RTP). Basically the HTTP protocol is only able to serve Hypertext, not video content. So you have to install some kind of streaming software on your server.

I actually don't know it, but I guess Jinzora would be a good option for you, since its developed in PHP and uses MySQL as a backend (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinzora), but there are lots of other solutions out there.

You can watch the streamed content with streamin clients then. VLC is pretty common I think, but there are also Flash Clients out there like http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/ which you can integrate in your websites.