The first step of the wizard is to let you choose a producer for your stream. Flumotion supports a wide range of audio and video producers. The first decision you need to make is whether your stream will have only audio, only video, or both. Normally you would choose audio-only, or both audio and video. On this page, choose both for your first test.

The next step is choosing the type of producer you want to use. The default choice are the Test Audio Producer and Test Video Producer. These produce a typical test image as used on TV, and a pure test tone. These producers are used to test if the server works internally. Choose both these test producers.

Depending on which video producer you choose, you will get a screen asking you to set some properties related to the producer. The number of choices here depends on the type of producer chosen. In the screenshot below we see the properties of the video test producer. Since this producer is quite flexible in what it can produce, there are many options to choose from, including image size, type and framerate.

In this screenshot, you can also see the worker dropdown box. We will explain later how you can configure more than one worker process on different machines. This dropdown box allows you to choose what worker this step will be run on. This allows you to distribute tasks across your server platform. At this moment, it only shows the local worker.

The overlay converter allows you to overlay some text on top of the video. At the bottom, some images will also be overlaid, depending on the options you choose at other steps in the wizard. For example, a stream licensed under Creative Commons will show the Creative Commons logo.

In these steps, you make choices for the encoding converters. These encoders will compress your stream to achieve a lower bit rate than the raw streams.

In the Basic version of the Flumotion Streaming Server, we offer a choice of high-quality free codecs. Most of these are part of the Ogg family of codecs provided by xiph.

On this page, choose the default settings of Ogg, Theora and Vorbis.

The Theora encoder allows you to choose either a target bit rate or a quality setting. For streaming, most people prefer to set bitrate as it makes bandwith consumption predictable. Choosing quality allows the encoder to choose a relatively constant quality level for the video stream, irrespective of the bitrate or other properties of the stream.

As an example, increasing width and height in the producer while keeping the bit rate constant will decrease the end quality of the stream. Keeping the quality constant, while changing width and height, will increase the bitrate of the stream, but keep the same quality.

It is very hard to give good recommendations on what bitrate to choose. The bitrate depends on a number of factors. These include width, height, and amount of movement in the source material, as well as total available bandwidth and bandwidth of your viewers.

For this test, choose the default bit rate proposed.

Now that you have your stream set up, you need to decide what you want to do with it. Through the wizard you can easily select if you just want one stream with both audio and video, one stream with only audio, or one stream with only video, or any of these combined.

The wizard also lets you choose to archive the stream to disk. For now, choose the default of streaming both audio and video.

The final step of setting up your streams is configuring the HTTP streaming server. In this step, you can choose a port to listen on, various limits, and a mount point on the server. Again, for this test, choose the defaults.