HTTP-live steaming on Linux server

Question

I find it hard to find some conclusive information on this. I have a dedicated server in a datacenter with Debian 5.0. I have an iPhone/iPad app which uses a JAVA EE (Glassfish 2.1) backend, and I am in the process of implementing video into the App. This includes live streaming and video's are longer than 10 minutes I need HTTP Live Streaming.

What is the best open-source/free solution to implement? This is only a pilot project, so I don't want to subscribe to any paid service. I have currently nothing in place yet for the live streaming, so am flexible to adapt any system (server or client side).

I came across:

• Darwin (but am not sure that project is alive, as there is not a lot of info)
• Red5 (but cannot find conclusive if this would allow an easy implementation of HTTP live streaming)
• FFMPEG

Regarding the video's, I would ideally like to upload a 720p version to the server (for iPad) and then convert automatic (either on the fly when requested or prepared when the file is uploaded) to the required formats for iPhone/iTouch and low bandwidth. For live streaming I would like to be able to provide the content in about 30 seconds from it streaming into the server.

I am not envisaging high demands (e.g. a lot of simultaneous requests, and if so (e.g. live event) on one stream which should be able to be dealt with using HTTP-live streaming, it only needs encoding and segmenting once).

In the )not so near) future android will probably be made part of the App as well.

Any hints/tutorial/suggestions/advice would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Wowza is pretty good for live streaming to iOS (as well as flash)

It isn't free though.