mirror of https://github.com/tLDP/LDP
62 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
62 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
<chapter id="vod"><title id="tvod">Video On Demand</title>
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<sect1><title>Overview</title>
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<para>
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With Video On Demand (VOD), the user can start the video when he
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wants, make pauses, go forward and back in the video. It is of course
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the best in video streaming and the dream for every user.
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</para>
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<para>
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VOD is a very big consumer of resources for the server and the
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network. VOD is unicast, not multicast : this means that the network and
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server resources needed are directly proportional to the number of
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clients.
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</para>
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<para>
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The design of VideoLAN's VOD solution is very simple. The idea is to
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do HTTP streaming, i.e. stream an MPEG video encapsulated in HTTP. The
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regulation of the bitrate between the client and the server is done
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automatically by TCP. With HTTP version 1.1, there is the possibility to
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seek in a file downloaded, that's what we use to seek in the video.
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</para>
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<sect1><title>On the server side</title>
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<para> On the VOD server, you need a running Web server. For example,
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you can use a Linux server running Apache. Other operating systems
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and other Web servers should work too, but we have never tested.</para>
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<para>Make your MPEG 1, MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 / DivX files available to the
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clients on the Web server. </para>
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<para>
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For example, we have a Web server whose DNS name is
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<emphasis>localserver</emphasis>. On this server,
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we put an MPEG file <filename>video1.mpg</filename>
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which will be available to the clients at the URL
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<filename>http://localserver/test/video1.mpg</filename>.
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</para>
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<sect1><title>On the client side</title>
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<para>
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Launch VLC, then click on the <emphasis>Net</emphasis>
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button or select in the menu <emphasis>File / Network
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stream</emphasis>, select <emphasis>HTTP</emphasis> and type the URL
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<filename>http://localserver/test/video1.mpg</filename>.
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</para>
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<para>
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VLC starts to read the stream nearly immediately and you can seek in the
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stream, make pauses, etc... as if the stream was a local file.
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</para>
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