Distribution of video archives
Before stepping into a more specific view on hardware and software solutions, this research will analyze a situation for video streaming technologies, envisioning a possible real life application for video streaming, other than the well known scheme of broadcast one-to-many.
Let's assume a scenario in which we need to import high quality video (MPEG2 6-8Mb/s) storing it into our video repository to make it available to different players on the same network; live streaming is required as well, to feed players with some non-stored video which gets compressed on the fly.
This is in fact a need for Montevideo's exhibitions, for instance.
here is a diagram of our high quality video network
In such a situation we distinguish 3 fundamental components of this workflow: the Storage, the Encoder and the Players.
The Storage is where all the recorded video is stored, it is capable of streaming on demand its "static" files to Players and it offers write access to its storage for the Encoder.
The Encoder can get input from other audio/video devices and will transform it into MPEG2 format, perfect for high quality streaming and storage; the result of the transformation can be saved in the Storage and/or streamed to Players.
The Players can connect to a live stream on the Encoder or play a file from the Storage, thus being able to show archived videos as well videos which are not stored but realtime converted into a playable format.
This setup eager the displaced reproduction of videos on a local network, keeping all the videos stored in a central server, thus simplifying the backup of the stored videos. Last but not least it offers a wide range of possibilities to customize and automatize the playback of the Players for applications like distributed video jukebox and kiosks for browsing digital video biblioteques, being also a scalable solution for Storages which are likely to grow in future.
Free software implementing the Storage and Player functions is already available: videolan is the video streaming client/server framework which should be used on every component of our setup, in order to let the MPEG2 video being streamed to Players across the network. But it's still missing a software to implement some of the Encoder functionalities: a way to remote control its actions and to send the encoded video to the Storage as well as streaming it to Players.