Your own live tv feed on the interweb

Posted by yossarian

I did some testing earlier and I actually got a video stream out onto the net and was watching it within about 20 minutes. My head exploded. It was really easy to do.

I was able to view the stream on Linux and Mac OS X using VLC. I was streaming and viewing on the Linux box (a 2.8 Ghz laptop, 512 MB RAM). The CPU sat at about 70% and the machine didn’t look like anything bad was going to happen, I left it running for about 45 minutes and it all seemed cool. The data rates were I think 70 kbps video and 60 kbps audio, which was about 1/4 of my 802.11b wireless card’s bandwidth. So this should work in most wireless situations if you’ve got a decent wifi connection. It was not using very much RAM, it didn’t seem. Hardware requirements should be fairly modest, maybe a 1Ghz machine would do it.

Installing Rmagick with Ruby on Debian

Posted by yossarian

A lot of the time, your web apps need to chop up, resize, or otherwise mangle images. One program that can do this on the server is ImageMagick. Here's how to get ImageMagick to work with Ruby on Rails on a Debian or Ubuntu box.