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Commit 39131bcf authored by Christophe Massiot's avatar Christophe Massiot
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* Added a documentation to use VLC as a netscape plug-in and do some 

(buggy) web streaming.
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<meta name="Description" content="Web streaming">
<meta name="Keywords" content="MPEG, Web, streaming, VideoLAN">
<meta name="Author"
content="Christophe Massiot, massiot@via.ecp.fr">
<link rev="made" href="mailto:massiot@via.ecp.fr">
<title>How to setup VLC for web streaming (X11 only)</title>
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<h1> How to set up VLC for web streaming (X11 only) </h1>
<h2> Abstract </h2>
VLC is a separate application which can either read a plain file or a TS
network stream. Using XSwallow, it is possible to incorporate VLC video
output window right into the window of a browser. With additional
tricks, it is also possible to launch a VLMS (VideoLAN MiniServer) on the
server-side, and have the client read a live network stream. This document,
intended for expert users only, describes the ways to do it.
<h2> Installing and configuring XSwallow for plain MPEG files </h2>
XSwallow is a software which allows any X11 window to be "swallowed"
(technically, just reparented, so that it has no effet on performance
anyhow) into the window of a netscape-compatible browser (Navigator,
Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, Opera...). This is indeed a trick in the X11
windowing model, and don't even expect to port this behaviour to any
non-X11-based operating system, even supported by VLC (MS Windows,
MacOS X, BeOS, QNX, ...). <p>
Download it here : <a href="http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/XSwallow.html">
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/XSwallow.html</a>. Compilation is really
straightforward, it basically boils down to some :
<pre> make -f makefile.linux </pre> <p>
Place the resulting xswallow.so in a directory scanned by your browser
for plug-ins (for instance, /usr/lib/netscape/plugins, this scan path
can with some browsers be read in $NPX_PLUGIN_PATH) and xswallow.conf
in the directory indicated by the environment variable $MOZILLA_HOME. If
it is currently unset, <b>set it</b> with for instance :
<pre> export MOZILLA_HOME=/etc </pre> <p>
Of course your mileage may vary. The last step is to customize xswallow.conf
so that it launches VLC to handle MPEG files. Comment out all lines you
don't need, and add :
<pre>
video/mpeg; mpeg,mpg,vob; vlc -I dummy -V xvideo %s; VideoLAN Client 0.2.83 (XVideo output); VideoLAN
</pre> <p>
Notes :
<ul>
<li> This assumes vlc is in your $PATH, if it is not the case, adapt it.
<li> If nothing shows up, it might be because VLC cannot find its plug-ins.
Please check that they are in an appropriate place (such as
/usr/lib/videolan/vlc). You can try to add -vvvvv to the arguments to
see where it fails.
<li> The third field on the line is the actual name of the window to
swallow. This is currently annoying, you will have to guess the
name of the video output window, ie. changing the version number
and the output plug-in (to SDL for instance if you use SDL). At
present there is no way to force VLC to use a definite name, but
it will be added by 0.2.90.
<li> When the window is first spawned, it will appear on screen and
then be quicky reparented, making some flickering. The usual
workaround is to make the window appear at offset +10000+10000
using the --geometry switch, but it is not currently supported
by VLC. The will be addressed by 0.2.90 too.
<li> If your window manager isn't configured for automatic placement
of new windows, it may ask you to manually place the window before
XSwallow can swallow it. This is annoying, too. The only workaround
is to disable the functionality (for instance with twm, add
RandomPlacement in .twmrc). It will be addressed at the same time
with --geometry.
<li> XSwallow will first download the file, and then launch VLC. There
is no way to begin reading the stream before it is complete, à la
QuickTime plug-in. This will be addressed in a future version of
VLC (0.4). If you want to do live streaming, proceed to the next
chapter.
</ul> <p>
From now on, if you have your browser reload its plug-in list, it will
display VideoLAN as application handler for video/mpeg. You should now
try and see what it yields.
<h2> Tricks for live web streaming using VLMS </h2>
With a little trick, it is possible to stream a video using VLC and VLMS,
and make it appear in a Web browser (without having a local copy of the
file). This will only work if there is no firewall (nor masquerading)
between the server and the client. It requires to have a CGI support
built into the Web server. <p>
Here is the sketch :
<ul>
<li> The client requests a specific page, say video.html. This page
contains an image tag to a file vlc.ts, AND launches a VLMS
through a CGI script.
<li> The client receives the vlc.ts file which contains the address
of the VLMS server, and through a special mime-type in XSwallow
spawns a VLC.
<li> As soon as VLC begins to receive the stream, it is swallowed by
XSwallow and appears in the browser's window.
</ul>
<h3> Configuring the Web server </h3>
In this section I will only give configuration directives for Apache.
You need to add a new MIME type for TS stream in httpd.conf :
<pre> AddType video/x-mpeg-ts .ts </pre> <p>
And relaunch your Web server (apachectl reload). Next, create the vlc.html
page. You need two specific lines, one to load vlc.ts, the other to start
the VLMS server ; for instance in PHP (adapt it for Perl, Java, or whatever) :
<pre>
&lt;img src="vlc.ts"&gt;
&lt;?php system("/var/www/cgi-bin/stream.sh $REMOTE_ADDR mystream.mpg &gt; /dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 &amp;"); ?&gt;
</pre> <p>
Where stream.sh is a simple shell script :
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
vlms -d $1 -a mpeg $2
</pre> <p>
VLMS starts streaming mystream.mpg to $REMOTE_ADDR (the IP address fetched
by the server, this is why you cannot do it through firewalls) on port 1234.
Notes :
<ul>
<li> The -a mpeg option may surprise you ; the VLMS doesn't preparse the
stream and thus cannot know which audio channel to send. If you had
an AC3 audio track, you could have put -a ac3. You can also
activate subtitles with -s.
<li> VLMS only reads MPEG-1 files from version 0.2 on. If you have an
older version, you may want to upgrade.
<li> It is possible that, due to the client latency, the client misses
the first frames of the stream. I have no ideal workaround for this.
<li> Some streams (especially MPEG-1) only have one sequence header at the
beginning of the stream. Since the client risks missing it, it may
be completely unable to decode the stream _at all_. If you only get
a blank screen, please try with another stream, such as one test
stream on <a href="ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/streams">
ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/streams</a> before issuing
a bug report.
<li> You should be careful that the stream.sh script is indeed launched
in the background. If your CGI program waits for it, it doesn't
hang up the connection until it finishes, and Web browsers wait
for the connection to be closed before launching plug-ins. In
that case you have nothing on screen, not even a <em> Click to
abort swallow </em> message.
</ul> <p>
Finally, create the vlc.ts file. It just contains the address of the server,
so that VLC can bind on it (you can't retrieve that from XSwallow). For
instance :
<pre> streaming.idealx.com </pre> <p>
<h3> Configuring XSwallow </h3>
You need to add an entry video/x-mpeg-ts in you xswallow.conf :
<pre> video/x-mpeg-ts; ts; video-streaming.sh %s; VideoLAN Client 0.2.83 (XVideo output); VideoLAN </pre> <p>
The same provisions as before apply here. The video-streaming.sh file is a
simple shell script which retrieves the server's name and spawns VLC :
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
SERVER=$( cat $@ )
vlc -I dummy -V xvideo ts://$SERVER
</pre> <p>
Here you go. This is quite a hack, but it will hold until the next major
release of VLC.
<h2> Acknowledgements </h2>
This page has been written by <a href="mailto:massiot@via.ecp.fr">
Christophe Massiot</a> for <a href="http://www.idealx.com/"> IDEALX
S.A.S</a>. <br>
<em> $Id: web-streaming.html,v 1.1 2001/08/22 18:47:52 massiot Exp $ </em>
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