Does anyone know of an open source web service/wcf service that can stream media content to clients? In particular I am looking for something that could access my music collection and stream it to a client (could be a client browser, win mobile app or even iphone application).
I guess it would have to be WCF based as I'm not sure that webservices do streaming really well. Also Windows Media Streaming Services is not the best way to go as the service should operate from a vista/xp machine (preferably).
If not, does anyone know the best way to start going about creating something like this - I'm not sure I know where to start with this one, although I can see many many uses for such a service!
Even though it's not open source, Windows Server 2008 has a Streaming Media role that will do what you ask. Of course, you'll need to have a server to put it on.
I tried Orb and it is quite good, apart from the fact that it hijacked my tuner card so media center would no longer work. However I'm going to try and create a home grown version.
Orb (www.orb.com) will stream your media to just about anything with a web browser. I've been running it on an XP virtual machine for about a year. I love being able to stream my entire media collection to my phone while I'm working at a client's site.
While it isn't open source, it is free and relatively well supported. One of the best features is that the architecture is set up so that there are no special requirements for your firewall -- it just works.
Related
I currently have a video chat app working on web(Flash) and android via Adobe AIR, it uses Adobe Media Server (RTMP) as backend for video streaming and shared objects, my question is, if there is another server or solution that provides many to many live video broadcast maybe using H.264 codec from android and iOS, have some sort of user list and room list stored in a database or similar, I want to move away from Adobe as it has many limitations on mobile devices.
Live video is crucial in 1 to many broadcasts that will have hundreds of viewers at the same time.
Thanks for reading!
Ulex.fr created an RTMP connector for Asterisk (the free PBX platform).
Used with the Asterisk Vonference application, it allows you to create conference rooms for 1 to many configuration, with audio and video. The only one limitation is the power of your server. You can plan a scalable architecure in order to broadcast one video to many (many could be unlimited). We developp a specific protocol to connect and manage the connection based on the telephony events. I think we already done a direct RTMP connection that skip this protocol too.
All the project done by ulex.fr is free, OpenSource and GPL.
Get the full project here : https://github.com/voximal/asterisk-rtmp
(a live demo is available)
We already develop an RTMP stack for android with video (using the camera), this allows you to create your own application without using AIR.
You can check Adobe Cirrus, it's still in the beta stage (actually IMHO Adobe forgot about it), but it works on web, desktop and mobile too. Check this Video Phone example, it can handle chat applications without a problem.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/samples/
You could take a look at Red5 Media Server, which is an open source solution. There are other options like the Wowza's solutions on AWS, but they come a higher cost...
Ok as today, we have decided that we can manage the users,rooms and messages via Google Firebase Real Time Database, and the live video stream using ANT Media Server
I am curious about relaying messages from one app on one machine to another machine. I have a shared network storage readily available to me. My thought is that I want to run an app on a single machine that runs intranet uploads. I cannot control anything about the domain or the shared network storage other than creating files/folders.
I want this app on its own machine to be able to report somehow to a completely different application installed on completely different user machines (so in case of errors lets say, users could intervene) and at some point, across platforms (vb.net/Access/etc).
The first thing that hit me was to stream write the upload app's status to a text file, and then have a timer on my users end app that monitors the file that the upload app writes to.
However, before implementing, I am wondering if I am reinventing the wheel, and theres a better way to do this. I am seeking simple solutions, and eventually I would like to integrate this into VBA/Access. What does SO think fits the bill? What is the downside to streaming a "log"?
You're reinventing the wheel. This is Message Queuing. There are many existing solutions to do this, including MSMQ (built into Windows) and RabbitMQ. There are also cloud based services like Azure AppFabric and Amazon Simple Queue Service.
We are currently planning to develop a suite of Windows Store Apps. They are independent and fully work alone, but they are related and act in concert. If a user has several of them, they should share some of their settings (and data), so that the user does not have to manually change these settings in every single one of them.
Is such a scenario even intented?
And how to implement it?
Registry: Does not work. Apps cannot access the registry.
ApplicationData (LocalFolder, LocalSettings etc.): Does not work. Apps cannot access the data of other apps.
Cloud services: Kind of works, but only when the machine is online. Our apps should work offline, too. And we would need to create/rent such a cloud service, which would cause additional costs.
KnownFolder.DocumentsLibrary: This –currently– looks like the only solution to me. The apps are already saving and sharing data there, so let's just save our settings there, too. But the name of the shared folder is one of the settings! And Windows Store Apps cannot create hidden files, so the user can see the settings file. This makes this solution a bit... "rough".
Any other ideas or additional information I have missed?
If you want them to sync with each other instantly, even when the device is offline, then that's your only option. Windows 8 Apps are not intended to share settings.
So much want of sharing.
Roaming API will only share with the SAME app, the SAME user, ANY W8 device.
SkyDrive will only share across ANY app, the SAME user, ANY device.
Using Azure (or any web service) will share across ANY app, ANY user, ANY device.
Don't do this
Don't use the register, the API is not supported
Don't use the file system, the boundaries cause your app to be brittle
Don't use ApplicationData.AnyFolder, this is restricted to a single app GUID
You had might as well get "instant" out of your language, man. That just doesn't happen. But you can have fast (let's call it near instant); you can use Sockets or SignalR to connect your client to some service out there with nearly instant responses. A less sophisticated approach would be to poll from your client, too. It has served developers for decades.
I am making an app for the iPhone in Xcode which needs to be able to send and receive excel data from a windows based machine. Making the app is no trouble but what would I need from a PC to access the app data?
Firstly, I wouldn't be using Excel as a data storage program. What you really should be using is a database hosted on a web server with a PHP interface etc. If you choose to go the database route, then you can easily use a Windows machine.
Though if you choose to stick with Excel, it would be theoretically be possible given that people have made apps to have full control of a computer remotely via an app. I just think that this approach is going to be very hard to set up, and will be a lot more clunky than any sort of web server set up. Don't forget that you can get free web server services if the data level is low.
As you mentioned, this PC won't have access to the internet. Assuming you aren't willing to fix that, I guess you'd be left with a Bluetooth or local wifi option. Having to plug it in would really defeat the purpose of an app, and I don't think that iPhones can even do that without mad hacks.
An alternative idea is to build an app that links in with some free web server service, then build VBA code to download it to your Excel sheet. When you plug your iPhone into your PC, use the hotspot to get internet access.
I've created a service for one of my apps. How do i create a system tray component in VB.net that can be used to monitor the progress of the service? Is there a way to have this installed via tcpip on multiple client machines such as those that are for our employees?
We do exactly that here, with the server running a really basic HTTP server on a configurable port on a separate thread that returns status in an XML format (nothing else, just that) -- the client just uses a web request to get the XML, before parsing it and displaying it appropriately.
This approach also allows for future extensibility (detailed status, sending service control commands, adding an association to an XSLT file elsewhere for use with a normal web browser, etc.)
You could use WCF for this. Using WCF your service would open up an EndPoint which would expose status information to callers. You could then build a tray icon application that can be deployed to the employees workstations. The tray icon application could periodically poll the WCF service the your Windows Service is hosting and get status information. I know #Johan mentioned Remoting already and this is a similar approach. I'd recommend WCF though as the programming API is more simple, IMHO, and WCF will give you more flexibility with regards to network transports, etc.
I guess your question is not about how to actually do the "traybar"-thing, but how to communicate with the service to get the information you want to show in the monitor/traybar-program?
It can be done in many ways, API is one way, use sendmessage/postmessage/getmessage is one way to make 2 running programs communicate with each other without having to store anything in files or databases first.
DDE is another way. If it needs to do the stuff via net then there is something called NetDDE, but I havent done anything with NetDDE I cant help anything there.
But about the API and DDE, feel free to ask more questions if you want some clarification.
I'll take the second question: Is there a way to remotely install software on client machines?
Yes. However it is very dependent on your environment. For example, if you have an Active Directory domain, you can use group policy to force installation of software on the client boxes.
If you don't like that or if you aren't on active directory, you can buy something like Altiris to push installs down.
Another option would be to use login scripts which would run a custom program to detect if your program is installed and take appropriate action. But then you are probably better off buying Altiris.
For the comunication part, i have used remoting before, and this works very well. With a little bit of configuration, you can even get it working to another machine.