Every day I am surprised and pleased by the depth and breadth of effort that is being put into streaming media. Today, I found another group of developers working hard to develop a set of tools that can be used to build streaming services. Interestingly, I found the Live.com site (see link) while I was looking for some information on Sun's Java Media Framework (JMF). And, I was looking for JMF info because I had found a blog entry from Rick Proctor who said he was trying
"to create streaming media server whose streams can be received by a generic player such as the Windows Media Player, not something requiring an applet I create or JMStudio from Sun."
So, I'm searching the internet looking to help Rick out. I first found a page from Sun's JMF documentation stating that RTSP support was available in JMF 2.1.1. No real info on how to implement it, however.
More digging led me to the live-devel mailing list. These folks have been working hard to get Live's tools to play with JMF. (see, for example, this post.) It's the opposite of Rick's problem - they have a server and were trying to get a JMIF client to receive an rtsp stream. Which is what led me to the Live.com website.
The Live.com folks have developed a number of C++ source-code libraries for use in building streaming media applications. They have made some applications developed with these libraries available also - I was very interested in LiveCaster, an application to multicast MP3s on the internet.
Link: LIVE.COM.
I agree with you on the amount of attention streaming servers are getting. At my company we do a lot of streaming and pay a 3rd party host. I'd like to bring some of the streaming in house. That means a providing a streaming server. Since I'm a fan of Java, I'd love to develop (or find) one in Java. It may be that the JMF spec will not support what I want to do.
If not, I'll probably turn to an open source one.
Rick.
Posted by: Rick Proctor | Feb 14, 2005 at 10:00 AM