[Gnash-dev] media server

[Rob Savoye]

If anybody is wondering what the hell "cygnal" is as the new directory
appears next time you update, here's a fast explanation. "Cygnal" is the
 Flash media server side of Gnash. It groks RTMP, RTMPT, and RTMPS, AMF
objects, and can talk Flash to a Flash player client. This is an
incredibly minimal prototype, but it does handle streaming files,
multiple network connections, and a working, if not fully debugged
RTMP/AMF implementation.

Although this is currently not fully implemented, there is some support
for statistics collecting on the network performance, so more long term
it should be able to do bandwidth shaping, etc.. to handle poor wireless
connections. There are plenty of known bugs, so please don't bury me in
bug reports just yet, patches are always preferred at this stage.
Currently, it gets configured, but not built by default.

I'm mostly checking this in so people can play with it, and hopefully
contribute to it's development. It's not quite up to the level of the
Red5 media server that also implements RTMP, but it's a start. Like
Red5, the goal is to produce a free (as in GPL'd) implementation of the
Flash media server.

Long term, this should give anyone that wants to use Flash video
streaming for a web site will be able to do so. I know there are a few
other streaming servers out there like icecast, vlc, or even the
ffmpeg-streamer. The main difference is Cygnal will also have Flash
support builtin, and a different feature set than these other video
servers, as it needs to be compatible with the Adobe media server.

        - rob -