[Techtalk] Open Standard for Video Streaming

[Alvin Goats]

>     What are the current standards for video streaming?
> Do we have a open standard? What are the apps
> available on Linux for this? What are the issues?

Video streaming is not really standardized, even though a few companies
try ;)

Microsoft asf, mpeg, vivo, RealMedia and Quicktime are the most common I
know of. As for a "standard", not really. There are some closed source
efforts going on to force everyone to formats that restrict you to
certain operating systems (guess which ones...) and there are some open
source efforts as well.



There is one that I heard about that involves the makers of cinelerra
for the video codec and ogg vorbis for the audio codec. 

Their efforts are to avoid mpeg audio (mp3) with the patent issues
currently going on, and to have a video codec that is license free. I
think their efforts are along the same lines of the Independant JPEG
Group with the release of the JFIF format for jpeg compression and the
consequent mpeg compression based on the JFIF format. The IJPEGG became
the ipso facto standard because there was soooo many images in their
format that the proprietary formats (including the one that uses the
patented compression format that causes a lot of trouble with viewing
images) fell to the wayside. 

As for viewing streaming video:

mtv (shareware mpeg player, US $10 the last time I bought)

mplayer (from Hungary, docs literally suck, but if you persevere,
extremely good for many different formats: realplayer, mpeg, .asf, .mov,
vivo, .qt, ...)

RealPlayer (free to download, plays realaudio and realvideo)

These players can stream, though mplayer is still tricky to use as a
streaming viewer.


Hope this helps some.

Alvin