I want to setup a video on demand server which support Http protocol. It is like Youtube, which hosts a lot of videos, and end users could play them from browser (by using Flash or Html 5).
Two quick questions,
For the big video files, shall I put them on disk or in memory? How Youtube or other big video site did it? Not sure if put all video in memory is too expensive, and put video on disk is too slow?
Is there any open source video hosting server for my purpose? If steaming is supported, it will be great.
thanks in advance,
George
If you just want to have an HTML page that links to your video files - no problem, but most browsers will download the entire file before you system even considers playing it.
If you want to stream the files (like YouTube and others do) then you aren't actually using HTTP for the video itself. HTTP is used to get the information about the stream so your player can stream and play directly without having to download the entire file first.
Streaming video uses RTSP (or some other streaming protocol) for the audio and video data.
The closest HTTP protocol can get to "streaming" video is to use Server-Push of individual image frame with each frame flagged to replace the previous frame. Not all browsers can handle this directly, but might need an ActiveX control or Java Applet. The original QuickTime did this before the streaming protocols were implemented at the servers.
re: how does YouTube deal with big video file
I suspect they are on disk until they are needed. Moved into memory only as needed. Flushed from memory when no longer needed.
re: is there an open source video server for my purpose
YES! Check out http://www.videolan.org/
-Jesse
another approach is to use HTTP Live Streaming - HLS - the web server is simply a standard httpd server - video/audio is preprocessed on server side into a set of bitrate playlists.
The logic is on the client side to retrieve the media as a series of 6 second files, based on bandwidth appropriate playlist.
So :
- use files not memory
- there are open source HLS segmentators (ffmpeg)
Related
I have a server (not internet connected) that hosts a webpage with company data on an internal website. The server also contains videos (thousands of them) in a defined directory structure.
When a client connects I can display the videos to them on the internal website. The problem is some of the video files are 1Gb or larger and the connection to some clients is rather slow; the browser seems to be trying to download them in order to play them rather than stream them.
Is there a video streaming server that I could send a file path to and it would serve the video back to the client as a stream?
I guess this is essentially transcoding the video that I need done. I'm not sure if PLEX or something like that is able to do it dynamically as there are hundreds of videos and new videos added all the time.
Sorry if i'm not being clear on my need. Send me a question if I haven't been clear on a point.
...the browser seems to be trying to download them in order to play them rather than stream them.
To echo what #Offbeatmammal said in the comments, if you're using MP4 files, you need to ensure the MOOV atom is at the beginning of the file. Without it, the browser doesn't know what byte offsets to request.
Ideally, encode your video files as fragmented. In FFmpeg:
ffmpeg -i ... -f mp4 -movflags frag_keyframe+empty_moov output.mp4
See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9734251/362536
That should allow the client to stream the MP4 files from any web server that supports HTTP/1.1 range requests. (Most all do, unless configured otherwise.)
However, there is another point to address:
The problem is some of the video files are 1Gb or larger and the connection to some clients is rather slow...
While fixing the streaming issue means the clients won't have to download the whole file first, they still need the bandwidth to keep up with the stream. If it's possible they won't, you'll want to implement some sort of transcoder.
I would recommend using an existing segmented streaming method such as DASH or HLS. HLS is currently the most compatible, thanks to Apple's platform policies. Either will enable adaptive bitrate switching, which will allow slow clients to automatically switch to a lower bitrate stream that they can smoothly keep up with. That way, slower clients can still see the video, albeit a lower quality one, while fast clients can get the full quality video.
You can use FFmpeg to do the transcoding and HLS playlist creation.
I'm not sure if PLEX or something like that is able to do it dynamically as there are hundreds of videos and new videos added all the time.
As for when you do this transcode, I suppose it depends on how much load you're looking at. If this is just one or two people viewing the file, you can transcode on demand if your servers can keep up. Ideally, you have at least a couple stream variants around for less popular files, and add more later if needed.
If you're doing this live, I'd recommend doing all of your transcoding up front. You can always prune old files/variants if you need the storage back.
I'm developing an ASP.NET application that's required to stream on-demand videos from server to client. Now I consider using DirectShow to do some kind of processing works before the video is transmitted over Internet. Following this article, I know I can transfer video stream over network through WMAsfWriter after it's processed by DirectShow and the output is a URL that the client can get access to through Windows Media player. But in my ASP.NET application, I want the video stream played on the web page of the client browser such as Chrome. I'm not sure if the output URL can be parsed by client browser and the video stream can be played there directly, so I want to ask that is it possible? If not, what extra steps do I need to take to achieve my goal?
I think you can made WebRTC streamer DirectShow filter and open this stream in browser. Ways like WMP / VLC player require ActiveX, that, really, dead technology now. Even Microsoft Edge do not support it anymore. WebRTC most common way today. Web version of Skype and a lot of other apps use it.
Firstly, I'm not sure if the title is clear enough. I just try to explain what happens to me and what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to detect the direct link of media files (films, videos, etc...) from some website by using 'Firebug' (Firefox), 'Inspector' (Firefox) or other tools in Chrome. I also tried with Wireshark. It's pretty easy for some website because I can see the direct link from the request and by using programs like Quicktime, I can save the file to my local disk. For some other websites, I can see requests for streaming media content. However, the problem is that for the same file, there are many requests. It seems that after each several seconds, they use a different request to load, say 1.5Mb. When I copy one detected link to the address bar, the browser downloads a small file (media type), but the file cannot be played. Following is one example for using multiple requests for a same video:
My questions are:
- How can they decompose the video content into multiple requests? How can they accumulate the responses? What kind of Protocol used? (From Wireshark, it's TCP stream, but I'm not sure if it correct because I read somewhere that rtmp is common). I watched a video on YouTube about 'rtmpdump' but it isn't applicable in this case (in the attached image)
- Is there any client tool that can help us to accumulate multiple media responses?
Thank you very much.
This is an HLS stream. Look at the start of the playback for a .m3u8 file. This will list the URL for each file. Each file is a small piece of the total video, Usually 2 to 10 seconds. Each segment should be playable on its own assuming there is no DRM. It is deliver over HTTP. Hence the name HTTP-Live-STREAMING
I've a scenario where there're two servers(server 1 & server 2). There's a web cam/CCTV cam(or of any kind) that feeds video to server 1. I assume the video feeding to the server 1 is easily done by the camera setup. This live video is now somehow sent to Server 2 which is eventually broadcast to the clients.
Now the thing is I actually need a lead to follow how to start with the whole thing and where does media server's role kick in(if it's actually needed). I don't have any idea whatsoever regarding the whole process and am having trouble making relevant searches. Any advise or help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance
is there any specific reason why 2 servers are involved ? You could easily stream video from server 1, where you get the camera feed.
You could either use a streaming media server (Like adobe media server) or use a standalone application like Windows Media Encoder to give out the live stream for users to view.
Does your server 1 have enough bandwidth to stream the video to multiple users ? If 100 people view your stream at 1 Mbps, you will be needing around 20Mbps bandwidth in your server at a minimum, else the video streams may suffer. If you cannot arrange that much bandwidth in your server, you will have to use a CDN hosted streaming server (There are lot of service providers).
If only a few users will be viewing your stream simultaneously, it may be fine with your existing setup.
If you are following the two server setup as you mentioned, follow these steps to broadcast.
Set up Adobe media server (trial will do for upto 10 simultaneous connection streams) on server 2.
Install Adobe media encoder on server 1, where the video stream is available.
From server 1, push the video stream via adobe media encoder to server 2, (set up a publishing point first for live).
get the streaming link from AMS installed in server 2, which can be embedded into any compatible player (flowplayer or jwplayer), and put it in a webpage for public access.
Hope this helps.
I'm building an application that will serve up video files to users on a variety of different platforms. As such, I need the ability to set up a server that will serve up video files that might need to be transcoded into a number of different formats. Basically, I want to replicate the functionality that TVersity provides.
The ideal solution would allow me to access the video stream via http, specifiying some sort of transcoding parameters in the call.
Anyone have any good ideas?
Thanks!
Chris
HTTP is not a streaming protocol. Have a look at progressive download - there are lots of PHP implementations / flash players available. ffmpeg is a good tool for converting formats / size / frame rates etc.