[vlc] Five Questions

[Akiva Lichtner]

I need to build a web site that can stream an hour of live video every day
to hundreds, possibly thousands of users. Some questions:

1. I think I saw an option in the HOW-TO to capture live video from an
attached device (on Linux) and serve it over HTTP. Is my understanding
correct?

2. Assuming the answer to 1. is YES then is the http server inside VLC
multithreaded, or do I have run multiple processes?

3. In either case, how can I estimate the number of CPU cores and the
bandwidth I would need? I understand that bandwidth is a function of video
quality and size. The user has to be able to make one person's facial
expressions well. That's the only requirement.

4. Is multicast a real option on the internet? I thought that firewalls and
routers drop it.

5. In terms of interfacing a camera to the Linux box, I cannot connect the
camera using firewire because it is in a different room. Would it be
possible to use an IP camera? It has an embedded HTTP server which only
supports 3-4 simultaneous users. Would it be possible (and sensible) to use
VLC to read that output and stream it again? Or are there wireless cameras
that VLC could work with?

Thanks for any help.
Akiva
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