I spent most of this morning helping a student with his project. J has a tendancy to go off at a tangent at the earliest opportunity. He's also had some problems with his PC lately and brought it in again.
To start with I went through windows media encoder with him using my own (recently purchased) webcam. It didn't take long to set up as the wizard did most of the work. I just had to specify to pull the stream from the encoder rather than a windows server. J seemed confident enough to know how this works and he did have some video clips on his PC suggesting that he had actually used it to capture some video of his own.
Earlier in the year I spent some time setting up the Tomcat JSP server on his machine and it looks like somewhere along the lines it got trashed. Luckily I kept my install instructions so I backed up his files, uninstalled what was left of the original server and reinstalled it all from the beginning (complete with Jonathans demo site).
J then showed me his media streaming page which had a slight error on it. He had somehow (or maybe Dreamweaver had) missed a closing ">" after the embed section. It took a while to find but eventually we got his page displaying the video stream from my machine and then I copied his page and showed him the part where a filename can be specified to view a file rather than a live stream. He seemed quite pleased with the progress and inquired about a user/password database system. I told him I couldn't do that for him and referred him to the JSP module web-pages.
After lunch I started looking at Slaxx. In particular one aspect of Slaxx seems to be causing me some irritation at the moment. I have been trying to connect to an external server but I just couldn't get it to work properly.
I found lots of articles about setting up network cards and routing tables (the best of which is here). I still couldn't get it to connect to the local gateway though and it kept coming back with a SIOCADDRT error. I tried everything listed in the article but Slaxx refuses to connect. I finally gave up and tried my Ubuntu live CD instead and was impressed when it managed to set up the gateway without any problems at all. Strange that Slaxx would let me ping any machines on the local subnet but nothing outside it.
