With Video On Demand (VOD), the client can start the video when he wants, make pauses, go forward and go back in the video. It's of course the best of video streaming and the dream for every client.
But VOD is a very big consumer of resources for the server and the network. VOD is unicast, not multicast. This mean that if 50 clients are doing VOD with the same server, watching a 5 Mbit/s MPEG 2 video, the resources needed as a minimum are the following :
You can see that VOD needs huge resources for the server in term of disk access and network connection, and for the backbone.
The design is very simple. The idea is to do HTTP streaming, i.e. stream an MPEG video encapsulated in HTTP. The regulation of the bitrate between the client and the server is done automatically by TCP. With HTTP version 1.1, there is the possibility to seek in a file downloaded, that we use to seek in the video.
On the VOD server, you need to install a Web server. For example, we use a Linux server running Apache as HTTP daemon. But other O.S. and other Web server should work too, but we have never tested. Make your MPEG 1 or 2 files available to the clients on the Web server.
On the client, you only need vlc
installed.
For example, we have a Web server whose DNS name is
vod.videolan.org
. On this server, there are two MPEG
files video1.mpg
and video2.mpg
available to the clients at
the adresses http://vod.videolan.org/test/video1.mpg
and
http://vod.videolan.org/test/video2.mpg
.
On the client, run vlc
with this command line to view the first video :
% vlc http://vod.videolan.org/test/video1.mpg
and this command line to view the second video :
% vlc http://vod.videolan.org/test/video2.mpg
You can also use the interface : click on "Net" and select HTTP and enter the URL "vod.videolan.org/test/video1.mpg" or "vod.videolan.org/test/video2.mpg".
The idea is to have a Web page with the list of the videos available,
and, when you clic on a video, vlc
starts to display it.
You have to write the Web page with regular hypertext links to the
video files and configure you Web browser to launch vlc
when a
file with ".mpg" (and ".mpeg" and ".vob") extension is selected. Tell
the client that vlc
accepts the URL as a command line : with this
configuration, the file will not be stored on the client's hard drive
but will be directly read by vlc
.
You can use miniVLCS
and enable the clients to select channel
1 to view the first video, channel 2 to view the second video, and so on.
Install miniVLCS
on a Linux machine (it can be the same machine as the
VOD server). Please, refer to the section describing
the building of miniVLCS.
In the following example, the configuration file vlcs.conf
should look
like that :
I: nostream
http://vod.videolan.org/test/video1.mpg
http://vod.videolan.org/test/video2.mpg
Then run miniVLCS
as a normal user :
% ./vlcs
The simplest solution is to use the interface of vlc : click on "Net", select "Channel server", write its IP address or DNS name.
Then, you see a new section "Network Channel" on the interface.
Select "1" and click on "Go!" to view the first video. Select "2" and click on "Go!" to view the second video.
This function is broken in release 0.4.0 of vlc
.
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