I am the IT guy for a small chain of preschools. Each school current has about 30-40 Axis IP webcams each, ranging from the old Axis 205,206 models, up to the Axis M1011. These cams allow parents to log into a website to view their kid's classrooms throughout the day. The IP cams are on a local network, streaming on port 80. Each school has one public ip address, on which is a reverse-proxy HTTP server. We directly serve the MJPEG from the Axis webcams by basically doing a URL rewrite to allow the client viewing app direct access to the cam via the Axis HTTP API.

This has worked fine for years, and even worked on iPhone, up until recently. In fact, it still works on iPhone, but only when connected Wifi. When the iPhone is connected via 3G, the MJPEG stream no longer works. The carrier is AT&T.

I have done quite a bit of research the past few days, and know that I have to move towards HTTP Live Streaming for Apple devices, so I'm just trying to get my head around the various parts of the puzzle I have to solve to make it work.

My mix of Axis cams may be a problem. The Axis 205 and 206 are MJPEG only, but the M1011 can serve h.264, but apparently only via RTSP. I'm willing to swap out the older Axis cams for the M1011 if that is required or helpful to the overall solution.

From my understanding so far, the first thing I have to sort out is getting my 30 to 40 Axis M1011 h.264 streams (re)encoded / chunked as MPEG-2 (.m3u8 and .ts files).

**Question #1**

Is it possible and/or feasible to setup one computer, with a "batch" file of VLC command lines, to start and encode 30 to 40 input streams, coming from Axis webcams, into MPEG-2, ready to serve up to iPhone? I'm wondering about the stability, hardware requirements, etc. to handle that many webcams. This same computer would have a HTTP server (probably IIS) and a public IP address, so no need to get the MPEG-2 files any farther than the local computer.

**Question #2**

For the older Axis models (205, 206) that only serve MJPEG, is is possible to use VLC to encode those to MPEG-2 as well? Am I correct in assuming that (re)encoding or re-packaging .h264 into MPEG-2 is a lot less "work" than encoding MJPEG into MPEG-2, or is it about the same amount of CPU, etc? I have installed the latest version of Videolan and it was easy enough to connect to the Axis M1011 .h264 stream via it's RTSP URL, so I know that much works.

**Question #3**

Can anyone share any specific VLC command lines or configuration, for either side of my given configuration: Axis M1011 .h264 and/or Axis MJPEG as inputs, and for the output, MPEG-2 (.m3u8 and .ts files), "chunked" into the size as required by Apple iPhone, especially when connected 3G. 

**Question #4**

Finally, if anyone has another suggested approach (different encoder, Media Server that would work better, etc. ) I would like to hear those suggestions as well.