For many companies, especially for broadcasters, there is a common question : how can I de-linearize the live to create VoD contents ? During last IBC, I made a turn of the different tools which can help to create this kind of workflows. Some provides software and others provides appliances. Here is an overview of the different solutions of the company I identified which provide solutions. Continue reading
This post is the result of a sort of challenge. The objective is to create an architecture to generate, manage and deliver HTTP streaming videos using free and/or open-source tools and/or applications. It need to answer to many questions : tools must be open source or free; reliability of the platform and the ability to scale up quickly. The architecture can be split in two parts : the content preparation and the delivery. I will expose an overview for each part of the architecture. Then I will list differents tools you can use. To finish, I will give you in details the architecture I will choose to deploy. But to realize this, few or some developments can be required, the language you will use, will be your choice. The operating system will be on Linux. Continue reading
Everybody knows ffmpeg the command line encoding tool but do you know ffserver ? ffserver is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. With it, you can stream over HTTP, RTP and RSTP.
The concept is to use ffmpeg to push content to one server. This server will transcode streams and deliver to the end-users.
Input streams are called feed and for each feed you can have multiple output stream.
We can manage ffserver via a configuration file. The syntax is close to the one used for Apache server. You can find a example here. And there are more informations in the ffserver wiki.
We will see two examples on how to deliver content via a ffserver. There will be a FLV and a WebM stream.
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In the previous post, we looked the new features of MistServer (version 1.1).
Today, I expose an idea exposed by a friend Nicolas Weil. We talked about the content caching for an architecture based on Mistserver especially for HTTP based format. We thought about Varnish, an HTTP accelerator. The idea is to keep in cache the different fragments which are generated by MistServer. This article will not talk about the RTMP or TS part, theses protocols are not HTTP based.
To make this test, I use on the same server MistServer and Varnish. Here is the architecture.
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I made last year a post to introduce a new streaming server : MistServer. From this article, I follow all the updates made by the team. The DDVTech team released the server in version 1.1 the 31th March. The changelog is available too.
Some important formats were updated in this new version : HLS and Smooth Streaming, HTTP Progressive. They added too MPEG TS protocol. The interface get some updates too for a better management. And the most important, the server gets many improvements. Continue reading