Recipe for a Drupal dedicated server with own hosted streaming audio and video?

Posted by besjon on April 9, 2009 at 6:57am

Hi,

I've been experimenting with a few different solutions but am going around in circles. Help!!!

We need to host Gigs of audio files (currently in MP3 and WMV formats, but we would like to convert them to MP3s on upload).

Each week we will add a bunch of long audio lectures and will also eventually be posting videos. Since each audio/video file will be at least one hour long we need to stream the files so viewers can jump around their timelines without having to download the whole media file first (we also want them to have the option to download the file).

Also, we can not use external Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) since our orthodox religious audience members use filtering software/firewalls which need to whitelist our specific host. This means we need to host and stream all the audio/video files ourselves.

We are looking at dedicated server solutions and would like any guidance/recommendations on:
1) Picking a company to build/manage a dedicated server optimized for Drupal and this type of application
2) Hardware configurations
3) Which Drupal modules to use
4) What streaming server software to use
5) Any additional info you can think of

Thanks.

Comments

Which Drupal modules to

Posted by mm167 on April 9, 2009 at 7:35am

Which Drupal modules to use
>> flashVodeo

What streaming server software to use
>> no need unless u want real time streaming.

Any additional info you can think of
>> bandwidth, usage limited,
>> video format
>> system loading vs operation budget

what is your budget (1st investment and monthly operation) and estimated loading requirement (concurrent user)?

We go the drupal way. How about you?
http://www.drupalway.com

Thanks for the response. Does

Posted by besjon on April 9, 2009 at 3:26pm

Thanks for the response.

Does flashVideo support streaming of audio files as well as video? From the project page it looks like it only is intended for video. Most of our content is audio at the moment.

I believe real-time streaming is required to allow users to jump to anywhere in the hour+ long audio/video files without first downloading the whole file.

Our budget is around $300/month to meet the server needs.

It is a new site and we don't have metrics for concurrent users - we expect the site to receive a few hundred visitors a week initially and to grow from there. We are looking to start with a moderate system that can scale as we grow and we determine our usage patterns.