If you want to set up your own web-TV or radio station, you’ll find an article in O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Hacks that describes how to set up a web radio on Mac OS X Jaguar.
In the following you’ll find information on what has changed since the book was published, because Apple doesn’t provide the free QuickTime Streaming Server anymore. In addition you’ll read how to stream video content, too.
The QuickTime Streaming Server is not free of charge anymore, but there is more than one way out:
- Buy the Mac OS X Server. It includes the QuickTime Streaming Server as well as the QTSS Publisher, a tool to prepare your media for streaming and to create playlists and even webpages that contain your media.
- If you look for a free solution, download Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server. You use it the same way like the old QuickTime Streaming Server, except from one difference: the webadmin interface doesn’t contain a button to start or stop the server. You have to use the Terminal instead. Don’t try to use the QTSS Publisher with Darwin Streaming Server. It won’t break anything, but it doesn’t work. Save the time of trying.
If you want to use the Darwin server, first download it as a binary file for Mac OS X (binaries for Windows and others are available, too) and start the installer. Please take care that you are already connected to the network you are going to use for streaming as the installer checks for your actual IP address to configure your server. If you change your IP later on you have to manually reconfigure your server.
After the installation has finished, your default web browser automatically invokes the webadmin to configure your server. The URL is 127.0.0.1:1220, where 127.0.0.1 means that you work on the local machine. Replace this with the public IP of your server if you want to control it remotely. :1220 means that you use port number 1220 to reach the admin interface.
Now enter a username and password you want to use to administer the server and follow the description that you find in the book Mac OS X Hacks. Video streaming follows the same rules like the web radio. To produce a video trailer, iLife’04 is a good starting point to create astonishing results. To get an idea of what you have to consider when you prepare your media for streaming, read Apple’s documentation that you can download here.
To stop the server, open a Terminal window, enter ‘top’ and look for two entries that deal with QuickTime Streaming. Memorize the number in the beginning of the row (One number is enough. If you stop one of the two processes, the other one quits automatically).
After hitting ‘q’ to stop the top command enter the following command:
sudo kill number
where number has to be replaced with the number you just memorized. After you entered your admin password, the server stops.
Yet, next time you start your Mac, the server automatically restarts. You can prevent it from doing so, yet, then you have to start it manually each time you want to use it.
To start the server manually, just enter QuickTimeStreamingServer in the Terminal.
To prevent the server from starting during bootup, remove the startup item. Open the Finder or the Terminal and open the directory /System/Library/StartupItems/. Delete the entries containing the QuickTime Streaming Server.
Now the server won’t start automatically anymore. To uninstall the server completely, just remove the directory /Library/QuickTimeStreaming.
Have fun with your new web radio and/or TV!
Please be aware, that you try this tip on your own risk!