[Building Sakai] Sakai & Darwin/QuickTime Streaming Server Token Pass Authentication?

[Charlie Macchia]

Hi Folks,

Wonder if anybody¹s either come up with a solution for this, or can point me
in the right direction:

I¹d like to be able to stream secure content ( not crazy secure, but secure
enough that a person must at least be logged into their Sakai account, and ­
once they start viewing the stream ­ can¹t just save the file and upload it
to YouTube as they currently can with progressive downloads ).

I¹m pondering a couple of solutions:

First, Apple¹s new HTTP ³Live Streams² may well work Š eventually Š I¹ve
experimented with it, and hosted a segmented live stream resource inside of
Sakai ( after using Apple¹s command line tool to break up the file into the
necessary segments and create the .m3u8 playlist file ), this is truly
snazzy, as Sakai by default provides the login and using it as the server
avoids having to do any choreographed token passing dance with an external
streaming server ( as well as all the other benefits of just sending HTTP
over port 80 ). Unfortunately, this only currently works with ³QuickTime X²
on the client end, meaning folks who are lucky enough to have a Intel Mac
running 10.6.x, or an iPhone with the 3.x OS on it - which leaves the vast
majority out in the cold. FWIW ­ I could get this to work fine with open to
the public content, but I wasn¹t so lucky with secure content Š might be a
cookie issue? Regardless, this is interesting, and no doubt the iPhone is
going to only grow in importance as a learning tool, but for now, this is
mostly something of interest, not necessarily of extreme practical
importance. ( though tips in this realm would also be appreciated )

For the other 85% of the computing audience, it looks like I¹m stuck using
either some sort of Flash server, or Darwin/QuickTime Streaming Server doing
a session authentication token pass dance: in which case, I need to be
pointed in the right direction.

The idea of reasonably securely streaming lectures with one-stop
authentication from inside of Sakai is just too sexy to ignore.

Thanks in advance.
Charlie

P.S.

I¹m using Sakai 2.6.1 ­ wondering if anybody out there has worked out a
means where authentication in Sakai can be passed along to an external
streaming server, preferably an open source streamer such as Darwin
Streaming Server ( H.264 is just too good not to use ­ there is a Flash open
source streamer, called RED, but it doesn¹t do H.264, and ­ AFAIK ­ Adobe¹s
other solutions are too pricey ): or if anybody knows of any other options?


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