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Streaming Video - Best Tool(s) For The Job?

I've been trying for about a week now to come up with a solution for streaming videos from my home connection (~512kbps upstream) to another location, but so far have come up empty. I can't seem to find any good client software that will transcode the video to the server...at least without crashing (VLC *cough*).

My question is, do any of you out there know of a good client software that will transcode a video to an IceCast server that's free? Also, what would be a good container/audio/video combination? I'm pretty sure IceCast supports Theora, but I haven't been able to get it to work. Thanks in advance!

One more thing. Preferably this would all be from the command line, as I don't have X installed on any of the boxes I work with.

Hmm, not sure if this will help (and I don't understand your environment at all) but take a look at the MPlayer package. If I remember right it has some streaming capabilities, and with the right codec packs it is fully OGG / Theora "aware". It can be run on the commandline in a headless configuration setting, AND it has a very powerful encoder (the mencoder binary) that comes along with it.

I've found a configuration string that works in VLC...at least when I'm streaming one episode at a time.

Code:

:sout=#transcode{vcodec=theo,vb=300,scale=.5,acodec=vorb,ab=48,channels=2,deinterlace}:duplicate{dst=std{access=shout,mux=ogg,dst=source:password@tv.someserv.er//mount_point}}

That config string uses the Theora codec for video and the Ogg Vorbis codec for audio. It takes the source material and scales it by half, and then deinterlaces it. The stuff at the end just connects the transcoded stream to the IceCast2 server. The source material that I'm streaming is 4:3, so I don't know if this will work with 16:9 videos. Let it also be noted that when streaming, this setup only uses ~20-40KB/sec of bandwidth. So you can stream to one client from say, a cable or DSL connection. Great if you have internet and want to stream a video from home to wherever you're at.

The problem I was having with VLC was that if you don't have just the right settings, VLC crashes. It took me about 15 crashes before I found the right combination of options.

I'll check out MPlayer rlyan76, and report back on my findings.

Cool, ok, I've learned something here too.. thanks for posting that commandline!