Howto Stream TV & Radio channels to mobile phones

[Rksk]

I have seen some mobile network providers (like mobitel & dialog), provide GPRS/3G live TV service on their official wap site. But it only for their custemers, others can't visit it.

I want to know, how to scrap from TV/Radio online web cast, convert and stream sounds & videos to mobile phones. Also can I host this service on my wap site?

I know, it will eat our bandwidth. But I'm going to buy a webhoster with unlimited bandwidth.

Thank you.

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[Neo]

I want to know, how to scrap from TV/Radio online web cast, convert and stream sounds & videos to mobile phones. Also can I host this service on my wap site?

I think you will have to face copyright violations if you do that for Dialog and Mobitel. There are free video broadcasts that you could try. Mostly videos are streamed in a popular format such as WMV, MP4, FLV, etc... and the stream is decoded in real-time on the client. What you need to make is a transcoder where you capture the stream and re-transmit by transcoding (encoding it to a different format/size, etc...) it in real-time. This will require lots of server resources and you hopefully need a dedicated server or at least a VPS. These are expensive.

I know, it will eat our bandwidth. But I'm going to buy a webhoster with unlimited bandwidth.

Unlimited is just a marketing word. There is nothing unlimited when it comes to finite machines like computers. Whenever you use excess disk space or bandwidth, you will be pushed to upgrade for a VPS or a Dedicated server.

However do not worry about the server stuff for now. You can concentrate on making the transcoder. I'll invite an expert who made several sites related to video streaming

[Only start this after A/Ls. According to my memory you are sitting this time, right. Be as our RAT16F88 who passed on his first shy to engineering faculty. He is now going through the leadership training and having fun with lots of beautiful girls who are begging for love ]

[Rksk]

I thought to scrap videos from official websites of TV channels witch have online telecast.

I understood, it wants more & more server resources. But I have seen a youtube downloader site (download videos from youtube and convert to many formats on user request) witch running on byethost. It is running by a srilankan guy & I don't think he use VPS or Dedicated host. But this site have thousands of downloads a day.

Also What about radio channels?

Can you help to stream videos & audios to mobile phones witch on the server?


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A/L is my goal. I'm doing it with my best. I come here when i'm having an interval. And ask about my ideas to prepair something to do in my next vacation.
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Thankz.

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[Neo]

I understood, it wants more & more server resources. But I have seen a youtube downloader site (download videos from youtube and convert to many formats on user request) witch running on byethost. It is running by a srilankan guy & I don't think he use VPS or Dedicated host. But this site have thousands of downloads a day.

There are transcoders available (one good example is ffmpeg) which you can capture a stream broadcast and transcode (decode and then encode) it to a different format/size/bitrate, etc... to suit your need. Youtube downloaders are easy to make. It just capture the video data in real-time and send you as a file data packets to save on your PC.

Also What about radio channels?

Radio is about Audio streaming. Formats like WMA, RM, MP3 are involved. Again you can use transcode, re-transmit or save to a file. I don't see a big difference other than you have more freedom on bandwidth management as audio data are far more smaller than Video data.

Can you help to stream videos & audios to mobile phones witch on the server?

I think you are asking about using our servers, right? For educational purposes, that's okay. However if it exceeds the bandwidth and start disrupting our other sites, then you will have to move to a good server. As I said, for your learning use it as your own. Let me know when you start so I can inform the admin.

[Rksk]

Can you give some examples to do these capturing, convertings and boardcastings? I googled, but nothing found.

Thank you Neo.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

[Neo]

Have a look at following sites.

http://polygeek.com/1423_flex_video-streaming-php-xmoov

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Video-St ... utorial/1/

[Rksk]

Thankz, what about using ffmpeg? is it supported on godaddy shared hosting?

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[Neo]

No idea on that. Never used ffmpeg on a web server.
One of our members worked on this on a Windows Shared Server (with ffmpeg.exe) but I'm not sure how to use it on Linux. So it is likely that you need to find a Windows server if you need to use ffmpeg for transcoding.

Shared hosting is never going to work for stuff like streaming due to shared bandwidth/disks and more importantly the CPU power and memory.

For professional quality/high bandwidth, there are servers called streaming servers dedicated for this purpose. Microsoft has a very good solution for this. However according to my memory, those are still very expensive.

First you need to decide on what exactly you need to do. Whether you need to divert an incoming stream/live stream (broadcast) or host some files on the server and stream them. Main constraint for mobile devices is the bandwidth. So transcoding is required to reduce the bandwidth/video size so users can watch the video in a fair quality. Transcoding require so much of CPU/RAM resources even to transcode a single stream. Say you have 100 users watching 10 different movies at 100 different video positions, that's where you face the problem. So I suggest you to start with broadcast streaming. That means you only stream one video file at a time and users can only join at the present playback point. They can't request what they want as in a video on demand system (such as youtube).

I'm sure the expert on this subject will join this topic as soon as time permits.

[Rksk]

I found some links to streming TV channels for mobile phones from http://worldwap.in/livemobiletv.php

These links aren't http, what is it?

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[Neo]

These links aren't http, what is it?

No.. Those are RSTP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) links.

The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is a network control protocol designed for use in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers. The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between end points. Clients of media servers issue VCR-like commands, such as play and pause, to facilitate real-time control of playback of media files from the server.

RTSP URLs appear as rtsp://... and the default port for the RTSP protocol is 554 for both UDP and TCP transports (You know it is 80 for http).

The Session Description Protocol (SDP) is a format for describing streaming media initialization parameters. SDP is intended for describing multimedia communication sessions for the purposes of session announcement, session invitation, and parameter negotiation. SDP does not deliver media itself but is used for negotiation between end points of media type, format, and all associated properties. The set of properties and parameters are often called a session profile. SDP is designed to be extensible to support new media types and formats.

Darwin Streaming Server (DSS), is the first open sourced RTP/RTSP streaming server. It was released March 16, 1999 and is a fully featured RTSP/RTP media streaming server capable of streaming a variety of media types including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 Part 2 and 3GP.

Read more on these wiki links.
Real Time Streaming Protocol
Session Description Protocol
Darwin Streaming Server

RKSK, Darwin Streaming Server seems to be a good option for your next project (which you only start after A/Ls)