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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>
+<img src="vlc.ts">
+<?php system("/var/www/cgi-bin/stream.sh $REMOTE_ADDR mystream.mpg > /dev/null 2>&1 &"); ?>
+</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>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
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