[Madlug] Streaming media server

[Skip Evans]

Hey all,

I'm finally getting settled here in Madison after 
my move from Montana, and am getting back to work. 
Woo hoo!!!

Anyway, I've already met some people doing some 
interesting things with streaming media. They're 
involved with the local public access TV station, 
and want to set up their own streaming media server.

Right now the guy doing most of it does live 
streams from his Windows laptop at his home, 
content he created with Windows Media Encoder, and 
that goes to a server at UW, which then makes the 
live stream available to users.

I'd like to learn how to set up and maintain a 
server to do this using Linux and open source 
tools because I have a client I'm doing PHP work 
for that does streaming media, though right now my 
role is strictly PHP development.

After a conversation with the guy today I was 
thinking that the way to go OS style would be for 
him to create ffmpeg content and stream that using 
Linux based tools (or perhaps FreeBSD, which I 
already have running on three servers at my 
disposal) in an attempt to shift away from M$ 
stuff to open source.

Right now the server at UW pays some fee to M$ 
from what I understand, hence my idea of going 
totally open source with ffmpeg.

I am totally, totally new to this, and what I 
vaguely proposed above is based on just what I 
Googled during our discussion today.

So any directions/advice, URLs and names of 
software to check out would be greatly appreciated.

I would be leaning towards a system based on 
Xubuntu, since that is my distro of choice these 
days, although I also see lots of multimedia stuff 
in FreeBSD 6.1 ports, so if anyone has any 
knowledge or direction that way I'd be open to 
that as well.

Thanks tons and I'm very happy to finally be here 
in Madison!

Skip
-- 
Skip Evans
Big Sky Penguin, LLC
503 S Baldwin St, #1
Madison, WI 53703
608-250-2720
http://bigskypenguin.com
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