Red 5 is a pretty amazing server software written in java. The Red 5 development team has put in tons of effort to make it a open source alternative to Adobe FMS – Flash Media Server.
Red 5 is a perfectly suitable technology for “Video On Demand” applications, streaming, publishing, mealtime collaboration, multi player gaming and more….
Red 5 is on all shared hosting plans of Hosting Marketers. By default the red5 server comes with some sample applications pre installed into it, like oflaDemo, fitcDemo, SoSample etc.
When installing and using red5 you have to keep in mind some configurations and security concerns. Red 5 was created to emulate the RTMP Protocol (realtime messaging).
Even today where many don’t know the capabilities of Red5 or are scared of the complications offered by java coding, i must tell you… once you get to use it you will love it 
.
There are many applications to be made with RTMP and many possibilities to be discussed. Here we will discuss a simple application that can stream from custom directory. This application will be server side and will help you set up your own basic application which does not require you to use the global oflaDemo.
Hosting Marketers offer you Red5 Hosting facility on their servers, which is needless to say … “amazing”.
You can host you own youtube or clipshare clones at a very nominal cost. However to avoid any problems, as you will be sharing resources on a shared server, its always better to create your own application, that accepts incoming outgoing requests.
This tutorial does not give you the scope to create the application from scratch, rather configure it to use a custom path on the server to stream from / record to . You can then safely use your own account path to handle streams. By default oflaDemo uses “streams” directory on the server to play/record streams.
Though this tutorial gives you a course on setting up the same, many have difficulties getting it done.
So here is the practical way of doing it.
I assume you already have basic Application class ready, which makes your application valid. We will simply use a custom filename generator to change the stream paths.
Setting up a custom Filename Generator: – CustomFilenameGenerator.java
package com.flashvisions;
import org.red5.server.api.IScope;
import org.red5.server.api.ScopeUtils;
import org.red5.server.api.stream.IStreamFilenameGenerator;
public class CustomFilenameGenerator implements IStreamFilenameGenerator {
/** Path that will store recorded videos. */
public static String recordPath;
/** Path that contains VOD streams. */
public static String playbackPath;
private String getStreamDirectory(IScope scope) {
final StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
final IScope app = ScopeUtils.findApplication(scope);
while (scope != null && scope != app) {
result.insert(0, “/” + scope.getName());
scope = scope.getParent();
}
return playbackPath + result.toString();
}
public String generateFilename(IScope scope, String name, GenerationType type) {
return generateFilename(scope, name, null, type);
}
public String generateFilename(IScope scope, String name, String extension, GenerationType type) {
String filename;
filename = getStreamDirectory(scope) + name;
if (extension != null)
// Add extension
filename += extension;
return filename;
}
public boolean resolvesToAbsolutePath() {
return true;
}
/* Setters for your path variables */
public void setPlaybackPath(String path) {
playbackPath = path;
}
public void setRecordPath(String path) {
recordPath = path;
}
}
Save this code in a file: CustomFilenameGenerator.java in the same package as your application class.
Now that we have setup the code , we need to make our application aware of the class so that it may
use the path values from this.
So we edit red5-web.xml. This one of the configuration files of red5. Generally the content or red5-
web.xml looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC “-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN”
“http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd”>
<beans>
<bean id=”placeholderConfig”
class=”org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer”>
<property name=”location” value=”/WEB-INF/red5-web.properties” />
</bean>
<bean id=”web.context”
autowire=”byType” />
<bean id=”web.scope”
init-method=”register”>
<property name=”server” ref=”red5.server” />
<property name=”parent” ref=”global.scope” />
<property name=”context” ref=”web.context” />
<property name=”handler” ref=”web.handler” />
<property name=”contextPath” value=”${webapp.contextPath}” />
<property name=”virtualHosts” value=”${webapp.virtualHosts}” />
</bean>
<bean id=”web.handler”
class=”com.flashvisions.Application”
singleton=”true” />
</beans>
The last bean instructs Red5 about the main application class. So just before the </beans>
closing tag .. we will add the directive for our CustomFilenameGenerator class.
So our final red5-web.xml will look like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC “-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN”
“http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd”>
<beans>
<bean id=”placeholderConfig”
class=”org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer”>
<property name=”location” value=”/WEB-INF/red5-web.properties” />
</bean>
<bean id=”web.context”
autowire=”byType” />
<bean id=”web.scope”
init-method=”register”>
<property name=”server” ref=”red5.server” />
<property name=”parent” ref=”global.scope” />
<property name=”context” ref=”web.context” />
<property name=”handler” ref=”web.handler” />
<property name=”contextPath” value=”${webapp.contextPath}” />
<property name=”virtualHosts” value=”${webapp.virtualHosts}” />
</bean>
<bean id=”web.handler”
class=”com.flashvisions.Application”
singleton=”true” />
<bean id=”streamFilenameGenerator”>
<property name=”playbackPath”>
<value>C:\</value>
</property>
<property name=”recordPath”>
<value>C:\</value>
</property>
</bean> </beans>
As per the above example …all streams will be recorded to/played from my c: drive. You can set your
account path instead of c:/ to use your own folders for streaming.
This tutorial was writen by Rajdeep Rath from Flash Visions
