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.
Related
I'm trying to stream several iPad screen to a single python client (computer) on a local network but I don't know which protocol to use.
I can do it with 1 Ipad using MonaServer, an app that stream on RTMP and a little Python script to read the video.
But I am dealing with problems to use several Ipads because as I saw RTMP uses a single port on Windows, :1935 and I am not sure it's possible to multi-stream with RTMP.
I am not a pro with networking, so if you have any suggestions I'm open
What you need is to following the wiki and usage of open source projects, to get some instincts about multiple clients live streaming.
For example, you could use OBS to publish some streams to a media server, like SRS, play it by different protocols like RTMP/HTTP-FLV/HLS/WebRTC.
You could publish multiple streams, they are not mutually exclusive. And play by different players, depends on the protocol you chose, please read this post.
Try it.
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 want to do encode a live stream for MPEG-DASH in various bitrates and resolutions for live playback.
Everything I found so far either uses only the source resolution (Nimble, nginx-rtmp-module) or seems to be only for VOD streaming(DASHEncoder).
Is it possible to use DASHEncoder with a live input (rtmp stream) and how would I do that?
If not, is it possible to use nginx-rtmp + ffmpeg for what I want to do?
There are several different services available which support such use-cases, like NGINX Plus.
I also successfully managed to run a live stream with Bitmovin and to the best of my knowledge livestream.com is also capable of doing that.
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)
I'm trying to understand and really pinpoint when to use progressive download vs. rtmp in flex/flash. It seems that the main point is that rtmp is not served with http, whereas progressive download is. Since it's not rtmp, the resource is protected since there is no way to connect to the rtmp server from outside the swf.
Even if the user can see that object code and can figure out the location
<object data="http://media.example.com/jw-player/player.swf" >
<param value="streamer=rtmp://sub.example.com/video
&file=1330/title/folder2/theflvresource.flv
&id=FlvPlayer" name="flashvars">
</object>
they would not be able to connect to rtmp. So rtmp seems to be more useful when you want to protect a resource? Is that all there is to it?
I agree with xtat, but want to add much more.
The pros and cons of RTMP (or any UDP-based streaming protocol) vs. 'progressive download' (which is really just a subset of HTTP-based streaming) in my not-so-humble opinion:
UDP-based streaming
Pros
Currently significantly more difficult to pilfer streams
Currently supports live, which HTTP-based does not
Multi-cast capable, which can be desirable on intranets
Cons
Dramatically higher resource usage, relative to http-based approach
Need for specialized servers (FMS, Red5, Wowza, whatever)
More noticeable buffering
Firewall issues, especially with corporate customers
HTTP-based streaming
Pros
Dead simple
Can seek into media. FLV and MP4 (with some effort)
Cons
Trivial to pilfer streams. E.g.: Real Downloader
Live streams not currently possible, but give it a year. Apple is making this a reality.
no multi-casting
The entire HTTP-based approach is filled with and/but/if situations, lots of misunderstandings about what is and is not possible, and a lack of common definitions.
There are two basic characteristics people are looking at when discussing HTTP-based streaming: seeking and regulated bandwidth. From that, we get all these terms like 'pseudo-streaming', 'progressive download', etc.
These are the definitions I use to describe HTTP-based streaming servers:
regulated bit-rate: The flat media file is parsed by the server, and it send media as fast as the player needs to play the media without buffering.
seeking: the ability of a web-server to seek into the media and effectively create a new 'file' on the fly for use by the client. Similar to an http byte-range request, except that headers and media meta data are added/modified.
progressive download: Just send the file, as fast as possible. Basically, put media file on web server that sends to client in a 'dumb' manner, like like a large .iso or .zip file.
pseudo streaming: the ability of a web server to send media files to the client with a regulated bit-rate and to seek into files.
Personally, the main reason to choose RTMP over progressive download is it allows your user to skip to the middle of a video without having to download the whole file.
These days unless you need to record, there's not really any point to using RTMP. HTTP is simpler and obviously much more widely supported, easier to debug and indeed it does allow for seeking, even over CDNs. This is what I have set up at Viddler.