stuartandnicola.com

As part of the ongoing development of my SWF Tools project I needed to get a streaming media server up and running to try things out.

I started out with Red5, an open source server, which pretty much worked out the box (or off the download!)

I then discovered you can get the offical Adobe Flash Media Server for free in a "development" edition that limits you to ten streams. Perfect for local development I thought.

It has taken me the best part of two nights to actually get it running with my existing XAMPP installation though! The final answer was so simple it seems trivial - in fms.ini change ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = :1935,80 to ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = 127.0.0.1:1935!

For future reference, here's what (I think) was happening.

When you install FMS it offers to install Apache as well. I didn't want that as I already had Apache running in my existing Xampp set up, which is where all my Drupal development stuff is.

But, if I started Xampp, and then started FMS, then I couldn't connect to any of the video streams. If I started FMS I then couldn't start Xampp because FMS was grabbing port 80 for itself.

If I amended fms.ini so it didn't listen on port 80, by setting ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = :1935 then none of the test videos work! I didn't understand why that should be since I was only trying to stream over RTMP, and that should default to 1935.

When I looked at the administration log I could see that all the streams were connecting via RTMPT, not RTMP. That means they were failing to connect on 1935, and were falling back to RTMPT (tunelling), and that needs port 80, so that's why things were failing.

I tried all sorts, including the suggestions on the Adobe website. However, trying to set FMS to proxy out to Apache (by changing the Apache listen port) broke everything.

I'm not quite sure where I found it, but from one website I ended up opening the Adaptor.xml file under conf/_defaultRoot_. There's a section in there called <HostPortList>, and the comments describe binding the server to to an IP address. The comments refer to binding 127.0.0.1, the localhost. In a flash (no pun intended) of desperation I tried adding the localhost IP address by changing ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT in fms.ini to ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = 127.0.0.1:1935.

I restarted the server, tried the test page, and suddenly it's connecting on RTMP!

I ran the Xampp port check program, and found that port 80 was now free. So I started Xampp, and that fired up too.

Last step, I tried to access the streamed content from my Drupal development site and I had video!

At last - streaming video on a test server. Now I can go back to what I was TRYING to do before...

Note - these instructions will get the media server up and running on localhost, where both the regular web server and the Flash Media Server need to co-exist, and the only requirement is to stream media over rtmp. It is not a solution for a "real" webserver since the fix described prevents fall back and tunelling over rtmpt.