Chapter 2. A first encounter

Chapter 2. A first encounter
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Table of Contents

Starting the administration interface

Wizard welcome screen
Choosing producers
Setting the properties of the video producer
Configuring Video Overlay Converter
Choosing encoders
Video Encoder settings
Consumer settings
HTTP streamer configuration

In this chapter we take you through your first encounter with Flumotion. The idea is to explain some of the steps involved, and getting a basic stream up and running. We will only use default settings, and everything will be run on your local machine. In later chapters we will explain how you can customize the configuration.

For this chapter, it is expected that you have installed Flumotion in some form, together with its dependencies. Three binaries (flumotion-manager, flumotion-worker and flumotion-admin) should be available in your path.

Starting the manager

You start by running flumotion-manager and checking that it is up and running.

[root@server root]# flumotion-manager -d 3 path/to/planet.xml 2> manager.log &
[root@server root]# ps -ef|grep flumotion-manager
root 7188 7148 1 18:24 pts/2 00:00:01 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/flumotion-manager /etc/flumotion/managers/default/planet.xml

This command does four things:

It starts the manager with logging output. All informational, warning and error messages will be output.
It starts the manager with the configuration as specified in planet.xml. This file is included with the source distribution as an example configuration, so you should use this example file by providing the correct path to it.
This file describes the configuration of the planet the manager is managing. Among other things, the authentication information for components logging in to the manager is specified here. ^[3]
All output is redirected to a log file, manager.log. This way you can look at all the log messages the manager generates using a standard text viewer.
The manager process is started in the background using &.

^[3] A host of other parameters are available when starting the manager. These include options to specify the communication protocol, the port to listen on, the host to listen as, ... For a list of these options, run flumotion-manager -h.

Some of these options can also be specified in the planet.xml the manager is started with. In this version, this file should be hand-edited to change configuration. In future versions, tools will be provided to manage these files from a GUI.