Starting a VLC Video-on-Demand Server in Linux

Using Video-on-Demand (VOD) has several advantages

• It’s faster since it uses UDP instead of TCP
• You can pause/play/rewind/fast-forward compared to traditional RTP
• Lesser overhead compared to RTP as RTP needs to transcode on-the-fly

Starting the VOD Server

1. Start the VLC Video-on-demand server. The server is running at 10.5.20.114 at port 554.

   sudo vlc-wrapper --ttl 12 -vvv --color -I telnet --telnet-password videolan --rtsp-host 10.5.20.114 --rtsp-port 554
   

2. Login to the VOD server via telnet which is running at port 4212 at the same IP. The password is videolan as mentioned above

   telnet 0.0.0.0 4212
   

3. Now you have to create a media object and link a media content to this object. This can be also be done by loading a script inside the telnet session. The name of the object I’ve created is myvideo

   new myvideo vod enabled
   setup myvideo input path/to/video.mp4
   

That’s it, the video is now being hosted in your server.

Accessing the video

You can view the video by using the URL rtsp://10.5.20.114:554/myvideo. You can also access it by command line by vlc-wrapper rtsp://10.5.20.114:554/myvideo

Automatic loading of video into the VOD server

Say you want to automatically login to the telnet server, create the object and add the media files. Then it is possible to write a script for it

1. Write a shell script as follows. Compare it with the above section to understand what is going on

   # The telnet password
   echo "videolan"
   sleep 2
   # Creating the video object
   echo "new myvideo vod enabled"
   sleep 2
   # Adding the media file to the object
   echo "setup myvideo input path/to/video.mp4"
   sleep 2
   # Exiting telnet
   echo "quit"
   

2. Run the script as follows

   sh script_name.sh | telnet 0.0.0.0 4212
   

This should be really handy during automation