Live streaming external FLV files

First of all, be sure to choose the right IP-cam model. It should be H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) standard enabled, since it's one of the most widely used codecs which are directly supported in Flash players. Another nice IP-cam feature would be it's ability to push streams to some destination(I mean streaming server here), not only publishing media on some ports.

Regarding second part of your question - this could be implemented using Darwin Streaming Server which is open source or other commercial streaming solutions as Wowza Media Server or Adobe Flash Media Server. Worth to mention that Wowza provides free version limited to 10 simultaneous client connections. Example installation presented here.

I have some experience with Wowza and it's seems to be the most simple solution to configure, if all you need is to publish live streams from several locations on a web-site, IMHO. By the way, you can find a lot of information on topic on their forums and site.

Additionally, you should consider Wowza for Amazon EC2 if you don't want to maintain your own dedicated streaming server. Another option seems to be Netromedia managed solutions, but unfortunately I can't provide any feedback regarding their services.

Hope that helps. Cheers

At least chatroulette is using RTMFP and stratus to push video from client to client, without passing it to a server (no big bandwidth usage). This goes through most simple home-networks thanks to hole punching.

The session setup and metadata passes through a server but that's simple message passing one could do with almost any technology today. Afaik they're using FMS for that.

See http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ and http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2008/12/try_rtmfp_and_clienttoclient_d.html

The rough flow is as follows:

1. user fires up browser to the site
2. Flash client connects to the server (outbound connection to server, could be rtmp or anything)
3. Flash client gets special permission to connect beyond the policies built in through the stratus api
4. Flash client executes UDP hole punching at the same time as the other person's client is. A direct UDP link is estabelished and they exchange audio/video data

I'd have to research it a bit to figure out what they do for fallback, but most likely it's a simple server relay of data, with the throughput requirements attached.