Streaming Video from Linux?

Thinking about streaming some video into SL from a well connected Linux box, anybody had any experience with mpeg4, hinting and all that Jaz? (and doing it all on Linux)

I looked into this awhile ago and couldn't find any really good information about it. I've got a well-hosted box that I'd love to stream video from (and into SL).. sadly, the frustration at the lack of information available, and some constant harassment by a neighbor, were two of the reasons I backed out of premiere and pretty much stopped playing.

Recently having obtained a Z800 HMD, I've had renewed interest in SL-and solving this long-standing question would be great.

So.. has anyone managed it? How'd you do it?

'Me too!' 'Me too!'

I've had some limited (read: quite unstable, needing-to-restart-the-videoplayer-every-few-minutes) luck by pointing VLC and/or mplayer at the rtsp/sdp stream, as nicked from the parcel settings. Note that rtsp support under these apps in linux is miserable when the payload is H.264 or (to a lesser extent) MPEG4, especially if the streaming server is Apple's one that comes with MacOSX -- and AFAICT most are; symptoms are video corruption and even videoplayer-crashes. I think they both use the Live.com RTSP client implementation which, while probably the best open-source implementation around, is still, well, miserable for connecting to most real-life streams nowadays.

I tried Helix/Real as a client and that barfed just connecting to (most) such servers.

I'd be interested in how some relevant GStreamer objects might cope.

A number of friends and I did a video stream using h.264 and Darwin streaming server, and it went along quite nicely. vlc should be able to play back the stream, as should newer versions of mplayer. I wasn't involved in the encoding and streaming process myself, but I can try to gather more information on how they did it exactly.

That would be most interesting.

Definitely, definitely. I know I can watch streams outside of the client via mplayer/VLC, I think the purpose of this thread is to gather information on streaming TO Second Life.

I appreciate the input thus far.. if anyone has anything to add, please, contribute