Enterprise streaming media? Sure, and on virtual Linux systems!

Many IT shops have strict policies prohibiting the storage of multimedia content on shared systems. Issues over copyrighted content and inappropriate material pose many problems. However, more business products offer various content in audio or video media. These can be training videos, quality assurance audio recordings, company commercials for employee viewing, bandwidth abuse or even music for lobby purposes.  Several options for a streaming multimedia server are available in Enterprise Linux environments.

Streaming multimedia storage

Some of these options include icecast, gnump3d, jinzora and shoutcast. I had an opportunity to configure GNUMP3d on my CentOS linux system and found it quite a good solution. For GNUP3d, the install was obtaining a tar file and a simple extraction, then running the following command:

make install

The GNUMP3d server configuration file is located at /gnump3d-3.0/etc/gnump3d.conf in the path where you extracted your tar file. Reading through this file is fairly intuitive and you can point your media path, some basic performance options, host server configuration, and security settings. Once it is saved and index operation is performed and the service started as /gnump3d-3.0/bin/gnump3d2 to start the service. From there, a website is up and running with your indexed media.

Some further customization of the interface to brand it to your Intranet would be a good idea as it is fairly basic and looks like free software. The various packages offer different levels of functionality and levels of the look and feel. GNUMP3d gets a star because it can be configured and running in a matter of five minutes.

Client streaming strategy

Virtual Linux environments can host these systems, especially if there is any concern about the bandwidth required if rolling this solution into existing Linux systems. Some bandwidth throttling and front-side firewalling may also be a good idea to ensure the intended audiences — even internally — are able to access this content for all configurations. For example, if you have many remote sites on limited bandwidth, the streaming media would not be appropriate.