I’ve been working on some projects in Erlang that I’m not sure if I want to keep them closed source or put them out in Open source. I’ve been going back and forth on this for several weeks and I thought I’d ask some opinions.
The two projects that I have that are big and somewhat harder then I would normally attempt are a Flash Media Server and a very specific VoIP server, both written in Erlang of course.
I haven’t started on the VoIP server yet, but I will as soon as I stabilize the Flash Media Server that I have been working on nearly non-stop for the past few weeks. The biggest problems I having at the moment is completely understand the TCP dumps I’m working with. I have the server communications working, the RTMP encode and decode is working pretty well and the AMF encoding and decoding is nearly perfect, I think I still need to add a few more AMF types. I can read and write FLV files but when it comes down to the playing or recording of FLV over the stream my packets seems to get to be the wrong size very quickly.
In any case, if anyone else is actively working on a Flash Media Server in Erlang and would like to talk about it please email me. I could be persuaded to turn mine into a new open source project that we could all benefit from.
As for the VoIP server, I’m leaning a little more towards opening that one up from start as all of the protocols are already open and having more people looking at the code will only help that project.
Technorati Tags: Erlang, Flash Media Server, FSM, VoIP
How is it going now?
I’m going to need some kind of FLV streaming server collaborating with my Ruby on Rails applications. And I really like to have an Erlang based streaming server to play with. Do you have any recommendation?
I’m currently stuck on timestamps within the FLV file while recording. I’ve pretty much so gotten RTMP and most of AMF working well and I think if I had the FLV timestamps working or if I at least understood them my FMS would work pretty well. I haven’t done any real work on playing files, although I think that is pretty easy once you get recording down.
I’m still not sure exactly what I am going to do with it, meaning I’m not sure if I’m going to open source it or not. Although while researching my FSM I’ve run across several comments about other people working on their own FMS in Erlang. I suspect one will be out in the wild in fully functional in not too long.
In fact you can find one that does do playback at http://code.google.com/p/erlyvideo/ The recording doesn’t work right on that one, he has the same timestamp issue that I do
and there are some issues with multiple RTMP packets of different types. It also does not handle applications the way a flash server should, but if all you need is playback my testing showed it worked.
the voip server sounds interesting. If it goes Open Source, I’d be interested in helping out. I guess with the current climate i’d be one of many (more reason to make it open?)
I’m going to be starting on the VoIP server in November or December. I’m still wrestling with the idea of Open Source for both the FMS and the VoIP server; although I tend to lean toward open source in most things anyway.
I’m really trying to make a framework of the best and most useful Internet technologies on this site; mostly for my own use, but also for others so the more help I get the better the framework will be for everyone
Hi,
I’ll be cheeky: I’m looking for an Erlang AMF remoting library. Don’t suppose you have one out back?
I think an OSS Erlang-based FMS would be super, esp if it was clusterable out of the box.
Also think that the intersection of interest is small enough (FMS x Erlang) that an open source project would be a good idea - just to give max chance of survival.
Great stuff, whatever you choose.
The people working on Red5 (an open source Java-based Flash Media Server alternative) have put lots of work into their product. We recently implemented a project using Red5; it works quite well. You may want to take a look at their code and/or get into touch with the developers; they’ve probably already solved the problems you’re experiencing.
I think it’d be great to have an Erlang server for Flash, and would love to see it open-sourced.
Actually I have been working on this with two other developers one of which is from the Red5 team
You can see more about it at http://erlyvideo.googlecode.com It is already quite functional and will be completely open source, based on an MIT license.
The team has solved the problems I was stopped on and we are now taking a breather while we look at some larger design issues.
We want to get the OTP design right and make the FMS completely distributed. We are working on the live feed and how to make sure they are handled properly across multiple nodes among other things at the moment.
I’ve been spending more time on my IMAP server then this project currently; so much of the progress of late is credited towards the other guys