mpeg-4 video linux,Streaming MPEG-4 with Linux | Linux Journal

Editors' Note: This article has been

updated since its original posting.

Seven years ago, when I was still a clueless kid, I played my

first video clip on the Internet using a 56k connection. It was in

Real Media format and contained a video track in 11Kbps and a mono

audio track. All the buffering drove me crazy. Today, with all

sorts of high-speed lines, you seldom come across network

congestion during playback of a streamed video clip. This new speed

has enabled rapid development of multimedia on the Internet. One of

them is video streaming.

What is video streaming? Traditionally, we must download the

whole video file in order to play it. With streaming, video data

sent to the streaming client is decoded and played immediately, as

it is received. Implementations such as video conferencing,

surveillance systems and video on demand (VOD) all are based on

video streaming technology.

When people talk about video streaming, the first word that

comes to mind is "expensive". Even if you are only converting

existing media content, the software required for conversion might

not be affordable for normal home users. One of the major reasons

to use Linux for video streaming is it is inexpensive. Most Linux

video encoding and streaming tools are free, and they are easy to

set up. In less than an hour, one could have a streaming server

serving a dozen of MPEG-4 clips. MPEG-4 allows encoding to happen

at different bit rates and resolutions, while these are limited in

some other codecs. The utmost advantage of using MPEG-4, of course,

is it offers a standard format that is becoming more popular.

Unlike proprietary formats, MPEG-4 is an open standard, so adding

MPEG-4 support is easy. A few MPEG-4 audio and video players

already are on the market, and more of them will be released in the

future.