I’m not talking about doing experiments with Finches of different colours and beak sizes – i’m on about Darwin Streaming Server, or DSS for short.

It’s all about streaming media across the internet using RTP and RTSP (i’ve gone acronym kerazee!) and is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. And seeing as at work we’ve seen the light and embraced a Linux setup, that’s great news.

It’s a breeze to install, just download the source code, do a quick ./Install and you’re done, although there’s a sneaky couple of commands that the documentation fails to mention ($ groupadd qtss and $ useradd -g qtss qtss).

Once it’s installed, point Real Player or Quicktime or whatever at rtsp://yourserver.com/movie.mov and hey presto, streaming media!

Feel the heat

The only downside at the moment is that the server (if you can call it that) I’ve installed Darwin on isn’t really up to the job and displays temperature warnings every 5 minutes. Very scary. If only we had a powerful server to run it on ….

Related posts:

1. Video transcoding, Darwin and the iPhone