Coding4Fun

A Tour of PeerCast

PeerCast is designed to stream videos from one PC that acts as a server and another PC that acts as a client and requests to stream videos directly from the server.

Client or Server Mode

When PeerCast first runs, you'll be prompted to select whether to run in client or server mode, as shown in Figure 5-1. Although PeerCast is designed to work across the Internet and on multiple PCs, you can run two instances of PeerCast at the same time on the same machine, where one is configured as a client and another as a server.

Figure 5-1. Choosing server or client mode

Server mode

In server mode, PeerCast will just sit and wait to receive commands from clients that ask to stream a particular video. In server mode, you can set the location on the server for the videos you want to make available for viewing by clicking the Select button, which pops up a folder browser dialog, as shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. Running PeerCast in server mode

Client mode

In client mode (Figure 5-3), we make requests to see what videos the server has made available to watch and start streaming them directly over the P2P network.

Figure 5-3. Streaming videos from PeerCast

Note

Depending on how your network ...