Roland's blog

Last time I wrote about how you could convert flv files to mp4. The powers of ffmpeg are rather cool!

I own a G1 phone and I want to be able to stream the MP4 videos directly to my phone. Straight MP4 format doesn't work because the android player has no idea how long the movie is so it may buffer the stream properly.

A popular protocol RTSP can be used, but also straight HTTP works.

In Ubuntu install the gpac package:
sudo apt-get install gpac

The add hints to an MP4 file using:
MP4Box -hint filename.mp4

Now you can stream the video directly from your video player. Skipping forth and back is quite responsive.

How about using a proper protocol to stream your videos? To the rescue comes Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. The Install script is quite crappy for Ubuntu, but Lincoln Stoll has come up with a deb package, which you can also download here: DarwinStreamingSrvr6.0.3-Linux.deb (22MB)

sudo dpkg -i DarwinStreamingSrvr6.0.3-Linux.deb

Next reset the password for admin using:

sudo qtpasswd admin

Finally go to your site: http://yoursite.com:1220/ , and follow the configuration settings. When asked whether to stream from port 80, don't allow that if you are using an HTTP server on that machine. More details are found here.