Jacob Applebaum is a well-known name among internet privacy advocates. It’s no surprise to see a Tor network based audio/video streaming application from him. The tool, named freenote, uses gstreamer as the multimedia framework. It respects your privacy, security, anonymity and liberty.
The working principle is simple – open a local video display showing a camera feed, to stream to a remote video share server as well as to provide a Tor Hidden service where a remote user may stream video in a purely peer to peer fashion without a third party. In addition to the remote OGG video stream on a Tor Hidden Service and a remote shoutcast server for audio, a local copy of the video is also stored in free format.
Installation
To install freenote on Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install tor torsocks gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-apps gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-x gstreamer0.10-alsa gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-tools gstreamer0.10-doc $ git clone https://github.com/ioerror/freenote.git
Usage
Server configuration
The tool is pre-configured to stream a 640×480 video with a text overlay using a common Logitech HD USB camera.
Add the following to your Tor configuration file (torrc file in the Tor installation directory),
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service_video_streamer/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080
After reconfiguring, share the hostname from /var/lib/tor/hidden_service_video_streamer/hostname.
Run the script:
$ ./stream.sh
Client configuration
You can directly watch the stream using Tor Browser using the onion URL. For example:
http://ylq7gsof3t3wrdkz.onion
Optionally, use clvc to watch the stream:
$ cvlc tcp://ylq7gsof3t3wrdkz.onion
To use MPlayer or netcat:
$ usewithtor nc ylq7gsof3t3wrdkz.onion 80| mplayer -cache 32 -
Webpage: freenote