I have been looking around for a good, open-source solution to provide some friends of mine with web conferencing ability. This would be a great case for technology. They live in different parts of the country and are involved in regular meetings for a non-profit organization. I told them that I would look into a cheap (as in free!) solution to their needs. I stumbled across Apple’s open source streaming Darwin server. Now, I haven’t implemented it, but this sounds intriguing. I haven’t been involved in any web conferencing solutions, so this will be fun to try. Anyone out there try this? I would be curious to hear what you think. Here’s some Q & A from the site:

Q. What is Darwin Streaming Server?

Darwin Streaming Server is the open source version of the QuickTime Streaming Server allowing you to stream hinted QuickTime, MPEG-4, and 3GPP files over the Internet via the industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols.

Q. What’s new in Darwin Streaming Server 5.5?

Darwin Streaming Server 5.5 includes the following enhancements:

• Latest security update changes
• Latest 3GPP release 5 client support
• High definition H.264 streaming
• Support for automatic bandwidth detection with QuickTime 7 Player
• Darwin Streaming Server 5.5.1 includes a security update for Windows

Q. What does the Darwin Streaming Server source include?

The package includes source files for a streaming server that can both serve on-disk QuickTime, MPEG-4, and 3GPP files and reflect live broadcasts, as well as source for the proxy (except on Windows).

Q. What platforms does the source compile and run on?

The source currently compiles and runs on Mac OS X Server, Linux (Red Hat 8 or higher recommended), Solaris 9, and Windows 2000/2003 Server. It can be ported to other platforms by modifying a handful of platform specific source files:

• OSThread, OSCond, OSMutex: Implements threads, mutexes, and condition variables. The implementations provided work on MacOS X as well as any platform that supports pthreads.
• OS: Includes some platform-specific code for getting the current time. Implementations provided work on MacOS X as well as any platform that supports gettimeofday.
• Socket: This class is C++ wrapper for the sockets API. On MacOS X, this class uses a set of APIs collectively called the Event Queue for receiving events from sockets in non-blocking mode. For other platforms, an implementation of the Event Queue APIs using select() has been provided in ev.cpp. For more details on the Event Queue, see “What is the Event Queue?” in the FAQ section.

[tag]Apple Darwin Streaming Server,Apple web conferencing[/tag]

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