How to Stream Live Videos

The cost of bandwidth is decreasing progressively and now with 3G services available in India even bandwidth on the go is quite affordable. Today, the notion of office within four walls is blurring and people prefer to work from anywhere. The ability to view live events from remote locations, saves on both travel and time. In this we show how you can live stream an event from a video camera to a browser using the VLC player. To implement this setup we need a machine with web cam, and VLC player, which is a free download from www.videolan.org, and a web server (in this sample implementation we have used Apache server for Windows (can be downloaded from www.apache.org). Now open VLC player and click on 'Media>Streaming>Capture Device'. Here add video and audio devices and click on 'Stream>Next'. Under 'Destinations' select 'New destination' as 'HTTP' and then click 'Add', and put a check mark on 'Display locally' to check if video is streaming properly. Add fixed IP address of the machine and port number and finally click on 'Next>Stream', and your camera and audio are streamed to provided the IP address. VLC also allows browser-based management. One can access controls of VLC on a browser by clicking 'View>Add Interface>Web Interface'. One difficulty you might face is that you can get '403 Forbidden' error while trying to access VLC from your browser. To overcome it, simple go to 'C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\http' and open '.hosts' file in notepad and remove comments in front of the appropriate entry (in our case 192.168.0.0/16). The next step is to install an Apache web server and host a web page in it that would display live footage. To achieve this, open notepad and type the following lines:

Save this file as 'localstream.asx'. Next, embed this stream in browser using the following lines of code:

We named this file as 'Sandy.html'. Open this file to enjoy live streaming to the browser. This kind of a setup needs a lot of bandwidth for smooth functioning otherwise you would experience lot of delay and frame drops.