Software/hardware to build video streaming server?

I am looking for a video streaming server solution, something like online TV server, with ability to make live broadcasts in the internet.

What software could you recommend for that?

What kind of hardware it should run on, should be there anything special?

I am looking for a solution that could be scaled up to at least 1000 simultaneous users online with good resolution of video.

I think it is good to have general answer on what direction to choose. But here more details on my specific case:

• I just looking for a solution almost from scratch. We have some video content that we've produced, but it is not delivered over internet yet.
• We do not tied to any particular vendor for now.
• We want to make 24 hours of steaming three 8 hour blocks with change of content every day.
• We want the ability to make regular live broadcasts.
• I guess we will need to have several options of streaming quality (low ~56 kb/s mid ~273 kb/s).
• Some terms just foreign to me (like play-truncation rate), if you could point out what parameters we should avare of, it would be great.
• Uplink to the internet is to be determined. We plan to start from something and scale up on the way.

If you are already have some kind of media streaming server, just describe its configuration here (hardware, OS, software), peak number of concurrent users it serves. I think it could help people approaching this task.

From serverfault Sasha Yanovets

• Ah, finally a question designed for me to answer :)

  Ok then, 1000 users, what codec/player/bitrate? how much content? what's the average content length? presumably no QoS/multicast options? what's serving your front-end? what's your expected play-truncation rate? what's your uplink to the internet (be as detailed as possible)?

  Are you tied into any particular vendors?

  Answer some of these questions and I'll be happy to help.

  Sasha Yanovets : Thanks for your input, I've updated the question.

  Chopper3 : drop me a line at 'phil at buckley-mellor dot com', this is a huge discussion but I'm more than happy to help.
  From Chopper3

• Sounds like chopper3 has this area pretty well covered, by for my $0.02:

  We stream on-demand lectures that run for about 12 hours each (broken up into one-hour blocks). We use Flash Media Server (but with a streaming-only license) from Adobe, and a custom-built app to display it in the presentation in the users browser (and tie slides/video/audio together).

  We run the server on a Dual Quad Core Xeon 2.4Ghz with 4Gb of ram and we've never run into any scaling issues, except for running out of RAM on occasion (FMS is very ram hungry). We run a link with 2mb uplink, but our media is of very low quality (320x240, high compression, mono audio). We've never had any complaints. We also use the RMTPE protocol, which is encrypted and has an additional CPU overhead.

  We can up-scale our link with a call to our ISP and it's done within a few minutes, so if it's ever under huge demand we can speed it up for a few hours, then drop it back again to save money.

  FMS has the ability to stream from live capture cards. It comes with a sample application that streams from your webcam, but it would not be difficult to have it stream from an alternate live source (capture card, etc).

  Hope this sheds some light!

  Sasha Yanovets : What OS your Flash Media Server is installed on?

  Farseeker : Windows 2003 R2 but by the sounds of it you'll be wanting something more focussed like redhat.
  From Farseeker

• You must try Wirecast from telestream its a must

  From don

• i have did this for one of the Telecom using Cent OS with VLC player and TV Setup box. You need to install VLMa

  http://studyhat.blogspot.com/2010/02/darwin-streaming-server-on-rhelfedora.html

  http://wiki.videolan.org/VLM

  http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html

  http://www.videolan.org/projects/multicat.html

  http://www.videolan.org/projects/dvblast.html

  From Rajat

• I'll describe the way we went with live broadcasts (two several hour events each week).

  We use "Live! Buckets" feature from SimpleCDN now. It's RTMP Flash Streaming. They use Wowza server. It's easier for us then maintain our own server. We publish stream with free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder. Wirecast is a feature rich alternative.

  Warning about SimpleCDN. Technically they are OK at live streaming. And price is low. I cannot see now any alternatives to that combination. But they are very slow to answer support tickets. Be carefull when you choose tariff. I took me a long time and persistance to downgrade it.

  Amazon Cloudfront going to support live streaming some time this year http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Does_CloudFront_support_live_streaming. But does not support it yet.

  And amazon support live streaming in EC2 with wowza: http://www.wowzamedia.com/ec2.html

  From Sasha Yanovets

• For video streaming, Microsoft have an excellent solution with Silverlight for the client side (or plain H.264), and IIS Smooth Streaming for the server side that allows automatic and transparent quality adjustment (and more). It's standard HTTP, so cacheable with any HTTP Proxy

  Here is a showcase: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/iis-smooth-streaming/demo/

  IIS Media Pack: http://www.iis.net/media

  It's really, as I know, one of the best solution for video streaming...

  From Kedare