Audio Video Streaming Solution for Bambuser

Abstract: Audio/Video streaming has widely been used in different applications but the social communication applications have especially raised its usage. The aim of this thesis is to design and develop an improved Audio/Video streaming solution for a Swedish company Bambuser and can easily be extended with new features where necessary. Currently Bambuser is using the Flash Media Server (FMS) for streaming the media, but it is license based and adds the extra cost to the company's budget. It does not support a wide range of platforms (e.g. OpenBSD and various Linux distributions) and also has limited options for the streaming. There is no real time monitoring and controlling functionality, which can show the status of essential services to the user, needed for the streaming (for example if the camera is working, microphone is turned on, battery power status. etc.). In order to solve these issues the GStreamer is used, which is an Open source multimedia streaming framework. The GStreamer environment was tested on different Linux distributions. The research and implementation includes the creation of the streaming pipeline and analyzing which options (i.e. GStreamer elements and plugins) are required to stream the media. It also includes the testing of different pipeline parameters (for example video rate, audio rate etc.) and noting their effects in a real working environment. Python binding with GStreamer is used to have better control over the pipeline. Another requirement of this project was to add the functionality of monitoring and control that shows the status of essential services to the user. Implementation of this part is done by using server and client side coding. Further improvements and suggestions are also proposed in this report.