By etherworks on

Hi! I'm doing a live video feed, and have succesfully got this to work on my site by putting a url into our flexinode module. This is the URL (although it probably won't work when you click it - im not currently broadcasting)
rtsp://eyesteelfilm.qtss.retrix.com/~eyesteelfilm/marathon.sdp

This works in Safari (ie, it plays embedded like other video) but not firefox or IE. IE tries to launch Realplayer (which crashes on my mac), FireFox does nothing (just displays the Q). Any ideas? Mime types? Modifiying the flexinode settings? If its the flexinode settings, how do I modify these?

Thanks!
Brett
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www.homelessnation.org

Comments

amstercad’s picture

amstercad
he, him
commented

you need to EMBED the rtsp tag.

search Apple's quicktime site for how to embed a streaming QT movie.

To allow a visitor to your site to launch the Quicktime Player from your page, you should create a "poster movie" with the method described on Apple's site. Then, upload your "poster movie" file to wherever you want on your web site (not your streaming server directory!) and use HTML code similar to this to embed it the streaming movie in your web page:

embed src="poster.mov" href="rtsp://your_streaming_subdomain.com/your_streaming_subdomain.com/movie.mov" width="200" height="240" target="quicktimeplayer"

You can also use a similar method to have the movie play directly in the web page like this:

embed src="poster.mov" href="rtsp://your_streaming_subdomain.com/your_streaming_subdomain.com/movie.mov" width="200" height="240" target="myself"

dshafer’s picture

dshafer commented

That's the advice I've gotten repeatedly. But although this will (usually) launch the QuickTime Player on Windows, it does not have the effect of streaming the multimedia. Instead, it downloads it.

Again, I may be missing something here. But I've gotten so frustrated trying to get this to work even with paid consultants helping that I've about given up.

etherworks’s picture

etherworks commented

How would you get that to work within an existing flexinode structure, though? I mean, if you had flexinode set the way you want it to normally display video, how would you make an exception? Just use a blog post or something?

Brett Gaylor
homelessnation.org

dshafer’s picture

dshafer commented

All I can tell you -- and I'm sure this is not what you want to hear -- is that streaming multimedia is a very difficult problem across browsers and platforms. Every once in a while I give it another try. I have never succeeded in making streaming QuickTime work on OS X and Windows browsers at the same time.

Now, I may just be ignorant or following bad advice, but I gotta tell you that I do a LOT of Web design and development and I think I have my fingers in enough pies that if this were something straightforward, I'd have been able to figure it out by now.

I'm keeping my eyes open, though, and if I hear of any decent solutions or approaches I'll let you know.

(My sense is that the big outfits that succeed with streaming multimedia use a lot of browser-sniffing and store different versions of the multimedia file on their servers.)

kerrizor’s picture

kerrizor commented

Its not all /that/ bad; I've done it dozens of times and as long as you're not trying anything fancier than shoving video down the pipe, you should be all good.

tdailey’s picture

tdailey commented

actually making a page that supports all those players is tricky, but not impossible. Look at the source for an apple.com trailers page, for example:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/missionimpossibleiii/medium.html

that works well (for me) on windows IE, windows firefox, mac safari, mac firefox.

Here's a good reference:
http://soundscreen.com/

Making a nice looking page with a preview frame, etc, takes a bit of work, but you should be able to do it. Using some custom themeing you should be able to make it fairly easy with flexinode.