Stream to my school's network without using outside service

mimoLive
1

I’d like to be able to stream our school’s live announcements via mimolive without using an outside source…saving internet bandwidth. What’s the best way to go about this that won’t cost an arm and a leg? Thanks!

2

Hi Tom,

Thank you for giving mimoLive a try.

The cheapest solution is to run the free open source NGINX as a streaming server on your own hardware. This requires a spare Linux server (or virtual machine) and a bit of admin setup, but if you’re up to the task (or find a student who is) this will be the most cost effective.

Best regards,

Oliver.

3

I tried out the solution Oliver suggested just out of curiosity, and it seems to be a fairly easy and flexible option if you need to host the streaming yourself, stream locally, or need to control the entire streaming pipeline yourself. Hopefully it helps the OP too, but I’m definitely liking it for myself.

4

Thanks for sharing your experience. Any particular gotchas anyone trying should look out for?

Best, Oliver.

5

@“Oliver (Boinx)” The only thing I could think of is just remember the relationship between you and your viewers from an IP Addressing/DNS perspective. If you’re streaming across a local network only, you can get away with using LAN IPs for streaming/viewing. If you later decide to stream publicly or outside your LAN’s subnet, you’ll need to update any streaming settings or webpage embeds to reflect the public IP or FQDN of the streaming server.

I did all my testing locally on a VM, and then decided to do some remote testing the next day on a dedicated box, and forgot to update my IPs/DNS appropriately. It only set me back about 5 minutes before I realized my mistake, but if you’re not familiar with IP networking, it could be a huge gotcha for those new to that aspect of the production pipeline.

6

Thanks for the info! Since I’m in uncharted territory here, can I run NGINX on the same machine that runs mimolive, or do I need a separate machine to point the mimolive stream to?

Tom

7

Tom,

Theoretically, you can run the streaming server on the same machine as mimoLive. We would not recommend this though, because of the computing load that machine needs to handle in that case.

Best regards,

Oliver.

8

I was able to test the streaming server in an Ubuntu Mate VM on the same machine as mimoLive with no difficulty, but I wouldn’t recommend it for production. This was on a 6-core Mac Pro and in ideal conditions. For production, I would definitely install nginx on a separate linux server. (or on a separate Mac or Windows server if you insist on running nginx on one of those platforms instead)

9

OK…
So, I tried the NGINX solution and it works, but not a huge fan. And I downloaded WOWZA and it works fine, but at $650/yr education price, it’s not going to happen (my high school won’t take on that one.)
Is there anything in the middle for streaming Mimo on my school intranet that’s a possibility?
Thanks…Tom

10

Tom, there is the Red 5 server, but we do not have any experience with it. It should work with mimoLive as it uses standard RTMP. http://red5.org/