Red5: Live Cam Streaming

Question

We're looking to add public/private "cam rooms" to our site. Similar to about a thousand other sites on the web (Chat Roulette, Stickam, etc). We've been using Red5 for the past year with various ready-to-go Flash chat apps, and we've been using JW Player for years. So we think we have the basic infrastructure in place to make this happen. But I'm a bit fuzzy on some details, and Red5 docs are hard to find.

My questions are:

1) What kind of software is needed to capture a person's cam, and send it back to the Red5 server?

2) Once step 1 is complete, how would I view the cam using JW Player (or any player actually)?

Additionally (and probably obviously) we would need a way to have different "rooms". Meaning sending the cam stream to room 1234, and pointing the player at that room to view the cam stream.

Can Red5 do this out of the box with the included demo software? Any tips/tutorials on setting this up would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

(sorry I can't use comments yet) I last used red5 over a year ago, setting it up on a media temple dedicated server and developed a few applications with it.

Generally the feel for red5 is that it handles the technology i.e. the rtmp etc and you can change your ports and stream through other ports if desired.

The applications on the other hand had to be written in Actionscript, tested and used in Flash before exporting.

I understand the issue with the jwplayer and the easiest way to overcome that is to use your own player (it's around 20 lines of code and far less complicated than the streaming apps/demos from red5). This is what we did, including configuring the player to play an offair video (black screen with text/20 lines of different colors running vertically..yay the old days) whenever the live stream was absent.

If you configure your site to redirect users to rooms, then you will not need the offair message/video as much (you will still need it but you will save a little in bandwidth).

Sending users to different rooms seems trivial though. You can always keep each cam pointing to a specific page and handle the rest with php/html/mod_rewrite & redirects combined i.e. just the layout of your pages including giving the user the feel that they are on a different page with the simple clean(I don't know why they call them beautiful) urls. Any solution can be tailored though, red5 is very flexible, along with php and the group.