It’s a week before your church hosts a conference. Your pastor informs you he received a DVD in the mail from some hot-to-trot new young, hip, internet-sensation pastor. He wants to show this DVD in four rooms at the same time!
Since there is no room in the budget, he wants you to do this using the existing equipment you already have!
What do you do, hotshot? What do you do?
Your first instinct is to make four copies of the DVD and have someone start a copy in each different room. Pretty easy. Until your pastor informs you he wants to make it available on the Internet, live. Your first thoughts are what you will be getting your pastor for “pastors appreciation day,” then you start to panic…
VLC to the Rescue!
Video Lan (VLC) is a beautiful piece of open source software that can accomplish all the above. It can play and stream almost any form of media across the room, or across the web.
This includes DVD, WMA, Real Video, XVID, FLV, MPEG 4, DIVX, H.246, and much, much more. Did I mention it was free and worked across multiple platforms (including Unix)? VLC can even serve live from a video camera or satellite if you have a video capture card. You can stream using both HTTP and FTP protocol.
Not just a Streaming Server
Some of you may be thinking, “great, but I have no need for a streaming server.” In reality, many of us do not have to worry about streaming at this point in time.
But, how many times have you found yourself helping a co-worker download yet another media player for some one-time unique video? Since VLC can play a variety of media, no need for a multitude of players littering up your computer. VLC is the one player that can take care of all your needs.
Since it is open source, it is free to deploy on as many PC’s, Macs, and Linux boxes as you can.
Enjoy!
Matt Phelps says
I’ve used VLC when I needed to play a WMV file that Windows Media Player couldn’t play. I started to prefer VLC when I found out it could convert a 4:3 video to 16:9 in real-time. Had to use it on a video that was recorded in 16:9, but someone forgot to adjust the settings for the encoder, so it was saved as a 4:3 file.
Don says
Arg. I forgot to mention the iPhone app. It allows you to use your apple device as a remote.
Stephen Bateman says
Sweet that’s really cool. Does it still require that you have a lot of server juice to back it up though?
Don says
This depends.
I have served DVD’s with a pentium 4 (1.9ghz) and 1gb DDR2 RAM, 512gb NVIDIA video card (80gb HDD) and Win XP 32bit.
It rocked out. The computer being served was similar in spec and it worked GREAT.
As for streaming live cameras, etc. I have see it work well with the same specs. I am not sure if a 64bit OS would be as kind. Win 7 or OSX might need more juice.
oschurch says
VLC is a great media player and generally supports all the formats really well. That’s a testament to the open source model because everyone wants different formats supported. In an open source media player, they all can get incorporated (albeit usually from reverse engineering which may actually make it officially illegal depending on your country…another reason to support open file formats without DRM). In a proprietary model, only those that the software creator supports get supported…therefore, you get a Real player, a WindowsMediaPlayer, …and on and on.
Kevin
http://opensourcechurch.com
Don says
I have heard some of the Apple stuff has open standards (correct me if I am wrong). But yea, it appears the DVD decoding etc. is supplied by other pieces of software. Are they open source too? I don’t know. I might look into that soon.
I think my fave part about VLC is how seamless it is. Some open source stuff can act slow or erratic. VLC works great no matter what. It is really well put together. I think it really has made the open source community raise their bar a little. Well, that and GIMP.
oschurch says
If you’ve seen my blog you’ll notice that I’m not much of a fan of Apple…so take what I say with a grain of salt. As a general rule, Apple is not into “open standards”. While things like using H.264 for HTML5 seems like an open standard (at least from Apple’s marketing material), they aren’t. From the things I’ve seen that are “open” that Apple uses, it’s usually to button up areas of their product line that they don’t want to really be in the business of like web email clients for their XServer. For a more interesting read, try the We Love Apple campaign from Adobe. The most interesting part is about the openness of the Flash platform which is true in my experience as I’ve done a fair bit of open source Flash development without Adobe’s IDE. Another good example of a company truly supporting open standards is Google open sourcing the VP8 codec from On2 in the next month or so. It’s probably not coincidence that Apple and Microsoft are trying to button up H.264 before that happens…
Anyway, the other thing to think about is that the open source community isn’t “raising the bar”. Open source as a development methodology is still relatively new. It takes time to develop mature, stable, cross-platform software whether it’s proprietary or open source. What’s really happening is that many projects like VLC, Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, Scribus, MySQL, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, etc. are now at a mature state to really compete with their proprietary counterparts that had a decade or more head start on features and stability. This is just to be expected. You can’t expect Gimp to immediately compete with Photoshop that just celebrated it’s 20th anniversary. Of course, now it’s been close to a decade for Gimp and it’s really showing it’s maturity. Because of this, now is a really great time to start looking into open source alternatives because many of them are mature and dependable (although even more aren’t!). But if you think “open source” means kludgy, you’re just wrong. There is immature and mature software and they both exist in proprietary and open source projects. Look for mature open source projects and I think you’ll be surprised just how high the bar is raising.
Kevin
http://opensourcechurch.com
Stuart says
Been using VLC for years and confess I haven’t looked into what it can do – this is so neat so my thanks for the tip.
irishmark says
i think i love you for this post