Introduction

Given the vast panorama of video technologies available nowadays, this research could fill up way too much paper in the attempt of covering every aspect of this field, instead i'll just try to narrow the focus to certain advanced aspects of streaming video, also trying to give a quick reference guide to the usage of selected free software.

So let's first define the field in which we'll move: streaming video provides a continuous digital video and/or audio signal across a data network. As a viewer, you typically make a web browser-based player connection to a streaming server to receive a webcast (live program) or video-on-demand (previously recorded program). The program is sent from the server to your player in a continuous way, as opposed to having the entire program downloaded before viewing can begin. In fact streaming makes the fruition of content immediate, no copy of the entire program needs to be stored on the computer being used for viewing, it is just about a stream of data being interpreted while received.

The aim of this research is to highlight affordable and reliable compression technologies, transport protocols, software and hardware setups for video streaming.

Emphasis is put on efficient resource allocation in terms of hardware and network usage: in any case this document will privilege the use of older technologies as it is the author's interest to recycle hardware which is often declared obsolete (marketing lie) by proprietary software employed on it.

The computer architecture mostly taken in consideration in this research is the PC ix86 (manufactured by Intel, AMD, Transmeta and VIA among the others) for two main reasons: the Apple platform offers a non free and less flexible platform for anything different from desktop publishing (still its video cutting applications are state of the art, but that's not about video streaming) while it is way less affordable and available in the 'south' of the world, where the author comes from.

Now, given the assumption that professional quality can be achieved using free software, as of the definition given by the Free Software Foundation, the main concerns are image quality, audio/video synchronization, efficient network usage, end-user access and flexibility.

An up to date version of this document is made available at the internet address korova.dyne.org/video_streaming and is downloadable in PDF format from korova.dyne.org/video_streaming.pdf.