I have a webcam connected to a lightweight system (BeagleBoard) running Angstrom and I'd like to serve the webcam traffic up to one or more viewers. The problem I face is threefold: 1) I want random viewers to come and go without having to stream to dedicated destination IPs 2) I need to lighten the load (processor and network) on the BeagleBoard, so I think it would be best to have a multi-tiered stream-and-forward approach from the BeagleBoard to a middle server and then out to the viewers 3) Preferably, the end stream would be viewable in an embedded plugin.
It looks like Red5 on my middle-tier server plus VLC streaming over http from the embedded system might work, but I'm not sure if there's a smart way to go about doing this or if Red5 can do the forwarding as I envision.
Honestly, I'm rather out of my element here, and even pointers to good starting places would be appreciated. Also, latency isn't a big concern as this only needs to be "mostly-live".
Red5 and Adobe FMS (they're very similar products) are exactly what this is designed for. You can also stream from those products directly into a Flash player via RMTP, so you don't need to have your clients have VLC installed.
Basically, Red5 would accept the stream from the webcam (appropriate streaming software would need to be on the webcam machine, as you've mentioned VLC would be perfect for this), and then the flash players (JWPlayer is a popular free one) would connect to the red5 over RMTP and bobs your uncle.