[Live-devel] Can't stream an mpeg-2 file

[Ross Finlayson]

Dermot,

For an open source, RTSP-compliant media player client, I would definitely 
focus on "VLC" or "MPlayer".  (In contrast, the Xine developers seem 
generally clueless about RTSP/RTP, and refuse to use the LIVE.COM code to 
implement it.  Instead, they're trying to write their own implementation 
from scratch in C.)

Between "VLC" and "MPlayer", I personally prefer VLC, because it seems to 
perform a bit better than MPlayer, and I personally find the VLC developers 
a bit more accessible and somewhat easier to deal with.  As you noted, both 
of these use the "LIVE.COM Streaming Media" libraries to implement RTSP.

Unfortunately VLC doesn't yet implement the playing of RTSP/RTP MPEG-2 
Transport Streams.  (This is something that I hope will get fixed 
soon.)  However, the latest CVS version of MPlayer *will* play RTSP/RTP 
MPEG-2 Transport Streams.

Neither player currently implements RTSP 'trick play' (pause, fast-forward, 
rewind).  Pause is already supported by the LIVE.COM RTSP client library, 
so either player could implement pause fairly easily, just by hooking into 
this.  Supporting fast-forward and rewind would also require some minor 
additions to the LIVE.COM libraries.

>Given that LIVE is LGPL, I presume that you have no problem with it being
>used in a commercial product?

No, no problem at all.  In fact, I *want* people to use this code in 
commercial products (and, in fact, it is already being used in several 
commercial products).

>I'm going to have to program a new gui anyway, so I'm wondering at this
>point if I might be as well to use liblive integrate with an LGPL lib
>which can do MPEG2-TS decoding. Does this sound feasible or a whole lot
>of work and do you know of an LGPL MPEG2-TS decoding lib?

Both VLC and MPlayer use the "FFMPEG libavcodec" library (see 
<http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/>) to implement MPEG2-TS decoding.  I think 
this is LGPL.  (However, to use this within a commercial product, you may 
need to pay license fees to patent holders (through the MPEG-LA) - but IANAL.)


	Ross Finlayson
	LIVE.COM
	<http://www.live.com/>