[streaming] Re: Enterprise Ready Streaming On-Demand Server

[Daniel Wells]

Thanks for the response.  My thoughts about the DRM is that there will always be an analog loophole.  We can modify VLC to restrict its capabilities for direct saving, couldn't we?  And if VLC was modified to require authentication to view our feeds, you would think it would be as good as any DRM.

With regards to the VOD server.  My real question was how robust VLC is, i.e., how many simultaneous streams can one server provide (I realize that this depends on the hardware, but have any tests been done).  It seems feasible that a system could be developed that acted as a front end to VLC that managed all of the content and created and removed feeds as needed (using the telnet interface or similar).  It could even sit in front of several VLC servers to offer some sort of load monitoring and balancing.

My other concern is that I do notice quite a bit a unreliability in the reproduction of the stream on the other end.  This could be a function of the type of media being streamed (not optimize for streaming).

I guess my question is, am I wasting my time looking into building our own system using VLC as the client and server backend or is our time better spent focusing on third party solutions?

Thanks again.
  
    - Daniel
 
 
From: Dermot McGahon [mailto:dermot at dspsrv.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 7:20 AM
To: vlan at byu.edu
Subject: Re: [streaming] Enterprise Ready Streaming On-Demand Server




Now there has been much talk about need for DRM to make some of our content providers happy. However when providing a "secure" stream, DRM seems irrelevant (correct me if I am wrong). 
It depends on the particulars of the concerns but it's likely that you're wrong. Content providers worry about peoples ability to re-use the content and a solution based on VLC will not prevent a user from saving and re-viewing the content as often as they like. Without DRM, that is.


Now on the server side we need something robust enough to handle a large ammount of simultaneous on demand streams. It is preferred that it has the ability to scale out (load balance streams across multiple servers). I have not found anything that can do this without a great deal of custom development (VLC inlcuded). 

There are many commercial solutions that can do this. The reason they are commercial is that it is not straight-forward and they have invested millions to achieve what you are looking for.

You didn't sign your post. It would be nice to know who I am corresponding with.



Dermot.

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