Fluendo announces official launch of the Flumotion Streaming Server project

Flumotion website and server source code made public with Java applet to follow

This press release marks the official launch of the free software version of Flumotion. Flumotion is a streaming media server with a modern distributed design and advanced extensibility. Flumotion is being developed by Linux multimedia specialist Fluendo.

Flumotion is available for immediate download through the public website,http://www.flumotion.com/, including the full source code, which is licensed under the standard license of the free software world: the GPL.

With the Flumotion Streaming Server project, we are leveraging the power of free software platforms to allow people to quickly and easily set up live streaming for conferences, concerts, lectures, web radio, web TV and a host of other applications, Fluendo CTO Thomas Vander Stichele says.

Our goal is to take streaming media from the fringes of the web and into the mainstream. The systems available to date have either been too expensive, too cumbersome to set up and use or too tied to proprietary formats and solutions. Flumotion is set to solve these issues.

Thanks to Fluendo’s close collaboration with the Xiph Foundation, Fluendo is able to provide a solution for streaming using royalty-free and unencumbered high-quality multimedia formats such as Vorbis, Speex and Theora. With the development of Flumotion, Fluendo wants to enable content providers to break free of the proprietary lock-in enforced by other solution providers.

The Flumotion Streaming Server is built on top of other successful free software projects. It uses GStreamer for the low-level multimedia handling, the Twisted framework for its high-level functionality, and ties the two together using the highly successful Python programming language. Flumotion aims to quickly match and surpass the capabilities of traditional streaming vendors, which have had their development stagnated, by allowing custom development and integration more quickly and easily.

As a special Christmas present, Fluendo will also release the source code to the eagerly anticipated Cortado, the Java applet player, which integrates with Flumotion to provide a cross-platform end-to-end streaming solution, on December 24th. This applet is able to play Ogg and Multipart network streams using Vorbis, Theora, Speex, JPEG or Smoke, inside any Java-enabled browser. The applet is already available in binary form on the Flumotion website for those who want to start using it today.