Flumotion 0.2.2 review

Flumotion project is a streaming media server created with the backing of Fluendo. It features intuitive graphical administration

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 811K Developer: Christian Schaller

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Flumotion project is a streaming media server created with the backing of Fluendo.

It features intuitive graphical administration tools, making the task of setting up and manipulating audio and video streams easy for even novice system administrators. Flumotion is released under the GPL.

Built upon proven and tested free software solutions

The Flumotion Streaming Server is built upon a platform of proven free software solutions. We have currently focused on the Linux platform for our main development. Flumotion is mainly written in the extremely popular Python language.

The high-level functionality is built on top of Twisted. The low-level functionality is built on top of GStreamer.

Wide hardware support

Due to the developers' decision to focus on supporting the GNU/Linux operating system, we have support for a wide range of audio and video input devices supported by the operating system.

Flumotion currently supports streaming from webcams, TV capture cards, FireWire DV cameras and the OSS and ALSA sound systems.

Distributed design

Flumotion has a distributed design, making it easy to spread the load over multiple machines, allowing you to do advanced media manipulation and stream generation. No matter how many different streams or multiple versions of the same stream you want to do, or different formats, or overlays, Flumotion can easily scale to handle it by distributing the load onto serveral machines.

Commercial support

While Flumotion is a free software product using the widely accepted GPL license, it has the advantage of having a commercial company behind it. This means that if you introduce Flumotion into your company or organisation and you find you would like commercial support opportunities or extra functionality, there is an entity to turn to to have your need filled.

Setting up Flumotion

Depending on how you installed Flumotion, it will or will not be integrated with your distribution.

In this section we will cover configuring Flumotion on both types of systems. First we will explain how to start and run Flumotion when it's not integrated with your distribution. These instructions also work on systems where it's integrated, but it's preferable to use the distribution-specific way of starting the server.

We also provide an example of running Flumotion on a system where it is integrated with the distribution through service scripts.

If you have received Flumotion packages from either Fluendo or your distribution, this type of integration should be available.
Flumotion on a system where it is not integrated

You are repsonsible yourself for providing a working configuration file, and starting the binaries.

Alternatively, we have also provided a service-like script called flumotion that provides some basic integration, much like a standard service script.

This script is installed in your sbin directory. You can list managers and workers configured, and start and stop them. Flumotion on a system where it's integrated

In a well-configured system, Flumotion is integrated into the system using Unix service scripts. In this section, we use the Fedora Core installation of Flumotion as an example. Depending on your distribution, these instructions might slightly vary.

To start flumotion with the service scripts, you start it like any other service, by typing as root:

service flumotion start

which results in:

Starting manager default: [ OK ]
Starting worker default: [ OK ]

Configuration files for flumotion are stored under /etc/flumotion/. In that directory, there is one subdirectory for managers and one for workers. Under each of these, there is one directory with the name of the manager or worker, containing the relevant configuration information.

Typically, the managers directory contains a planet.xml file detailing general configuration for the manager, and a flows subdirectory containing all flows that should be loaded onto this manager.

By default, the installation of Flumotion only allows connections from the local host, for security reasons. If you want to allow other hosts to log in workers or administration clients, you should change the authentication settings and remove the host entries from planet.xml.