MGoVideo :: MGoDVR; help needed!
One of the more frequent requests we have with people downloading games on MGoVideo is that they would prefer to watch them instantly (who wouldn't?).
I've been looking into possibly setting up a Flash Media Server or at the very least, a crude web server that I can host video from (although doesn't Comcast block 80? I know zilch about webservers).
I would prefer to go Flash, as it would be nice for you be able to 'Seek' (skip to a certain point), of a game. I'm not sure how Flash works, but I imagine there is a bit of trickeration between encoding to .flv and embedding a player.
This is a decent primer on running a Flash Media Server -http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/beginner_vod_fm3…
anyways, if you're knowledgeable about this kinda thing, let me know.
Do you mean watch them live (ala Justin TV) or watch recorded games without having to download the entire thing first? I have done the latter on a family website for family to watch the kids' events.
watching recorded games without having to download the entire thing. Like YouTube.
I'ved used flowplayer to embed flash video before, and it's worked pretty well.
interesting. Would you happen to know if you could point Flowplayer to the underlying .FLV hosted somewhere else?
What I mean by this is, MGoVideo runs on one box and does the http front end (and would have Flowplayer integrated into the site), however the hosting of the underlying .FLV video is somewhere else (Dropbox, free online storage place). Or does the .FLV have to be stored locally?
I've only done it with files stored on the same server as flowplayer, but it definitely looks possible to use a full url to an external location.
http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/rtmp.html
damnit. I guess RTMP is the magic sauce if you want to actually skip through the video, which means Flash Media Server is required (isn't as simple as just point and shoot to the .flv in another location).
But yeah, you see where I'm going with this. If I can figure out how to configure a server, we could basically have a streaming DVR where you could watch all the games, in HD (in Flash), and skip to anywhere within the game.
Found an Open Source program that does something similar 'Red5' - http://code.google.com/p/red5/
But with all things Open Source, very little documentation with respect to installation and configuration.
Looks like a fun summer ahead.
Let me know if this is what you are looking to do. It's all free software and pretty simple. If you point me to a flash file I'll see if I can make it work remotely.
http://campbellfamily-online.org/basketball/Milton1.html
Haven't been to your site in a while. Used to upload BB games as B10Network, but my userid is gone.
hey Steve, good to see you around.
Yeah, I'll send over a .flv later tonight - shoot me an email at akarpo at gmail.com so I have yours.
Yeah, Red5 server looks like exactly what I'm trying to do; the ability to seek at any point of the video is a big deal. Right now it looks like the video you have on there is flash, but static? (no seeking). Looks like this might be of use to you as well.
But yeah, what I envision is an http frontend integrated into MGoVideo with the games listed, with a dropdown to select what quality of video you'd want (Good/Better/Best).
Also, I'm looking into html5 video (would be FAR less of a headache), but I'm not sure if it supports seeking throughout the video. But html5 looks to be the future of online video and would require quite a bit less configuration.
TVersity has the flash interface and allows you to stream instantly (http://www.tversity.com), but the flash interface doesn't let you seek in a video. Its a possible option though (and super easy to set up).
TVersity allows you to watch stuff over LAN I believe, along with a few other devices. It lacks an http front end, meaning it can't really function as a webserver and allow me to stream content to peers who punch a url in their browser. at least that's what I interpreted reading the support documentation on their site.
I feel really stupid for not knowing about this or how easy it is to do with browsers most of us are already using.
HTML5 video demo
you'll need Firefox 3.6, the newest build of Chrome, or Safari 4.0 on OS X to play this back. But yeah, it is pretty sweet.
I should be able to convert the rest of the 2009 wins later tonight, we should have them for streaming.
Someone with an iPhone/iPad, please try that link out and let us know if that works (it should).
Ta-Da
http://stream.mgovideo.com/
She's beautiful. All credit goes to bndp, I just re-encoded the video. Pretty simple.
I'm thinking about putting all the 2008/2009 games in the library as a 'premium' function of MGoVideo so that we could pay for Amazon S3 hosting.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Beautiful, elegant, less CPU intensive than Flash; html5 was exactly what we were looking for. (amazing what you can learn in less than 24 hours)
I don't know how to get the stream to work. I am running the latest version of Firefox, Java, and all I get is an X when I try to play something. Or is that how its supposed to be right now?
Firefox is having 'issues' with html5 video support because I guess they don't subscribe to the whole idea of having h.264 license (even though they can easily afford the $10,000 to license it for their millions of users). Eventually, I see it being fixed.
For the time being, I recommend the latest Beta of Google Chrome for both Mac and PC. I've tested it on both platforms and it has worked flawlessly.
Sweet thanks, works like a charm on Chrome.