{"id":1544,"date":"2013-07-04T11:04:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-04T09:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/?p=1544"},"modified":"2015-10-26T14:35:13","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T13:35:13","slug":"play-with-ffserver-a-quick-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/2013\/07\/04\/play-with-ffserver-a-quick-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Play with ffserver – a quick overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"ffmpeg\"$ <\/a>Everybody knows ffmpeg<\/a> the command line encoding tool but do you know ffserver ? ffserver<\/a>\u00a0is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. With it, you can stream over HTTP, RTP<\/a> and RSTP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quick overview<\/h2>\n
The concept is to use ffmpeg to push content to one server. This server will transcode streams and deliver to the end-users.<\/p>\n
$\"FFServer$ <\/a><\/p>\n
Input streams are called feed and for each feed you can have multiple output stream.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. And there are more informations in the ffserver wiki<\/a>.<\/p>\n
We will see two examples on how to deliver content via a ffserver. There will be a FLV and a WebM stream.
\n<\/p>\n

Stream FLV<\/h2>\n

In this example, we will have one input stream and two output : one in FLV and one WebM.<\/p>\n

Here are the general configuration settings<\/p>\n

\r\nPort 8090\r\nBindAddress 0.0.0.0\r\nMaxHTTPConnections 2000\r\nMaxClients 1000\r\nMaxBandwidth 1000\r\nCustomLog -\r\n<\/pre>\nWe define a status page.<\/p>\n\r\n<Stream stat.html>\r\nFormat status\r\nACL allow localhost\r\nACL allow 192.168.0.0 192.168.255.255\r\n<\/Stream>\r\n<\/pre>\nThis page will help us to monitor the server. This page is call with this url : http:\/\/localhost:8090\/stat.html and you will get this page :<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
Now we set up the feed : storage area, max size and allowed referrers. Remember, feeds are the input of the ffserver.<\/p>\n
\r\n<Feed feed1.ffm>\r\nFile \/tmp\/feed1.ffm\r\nFileMaxSize 1G\r\nACL allow 127.0.0.1\r\n<\/Feed>\r\n<\/pre>\nOk, our configuration file have now a input feed. Now, we will add the first output : the FLV one. The video will be encoded in H264 for video and AAC for audio. This part is divided in 3 part :<\/p>\n\ngeneral settings : which feed is used and output format<\/li>\n
settings for video<\/li>\nsettings for audio<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\r\n<Stream live.flv>\r\nFormat flv\r\nFeed feed1.ffm\r\n\r\nVideoCodec libx264\r\nVideoFrameRate 30\r\nVideoBitRate 800\r\nVideoSize 720x576\r\nAVOptionVideo crf 23\r\nAVOptionVideo preset medium\r\nAVOptionVideo me_range 16\r\nAVOptionVideo qdiff 4\r\nAVOptionVideo qmin 10\r\nAVOptionVideo qmax 51\r\nAVOptionVideo flags +global_header\r\n\r\nAudioCodec aac\r\nStrict -2\r\nAudioBitRate 128\r\nAudioChannels 2\r\nAudioSampleRate 44100\r\nAVOptionAudio flags +global_header\r\n<\/Stream>\r\n<\/pre>\nThe first part of our server is now configured and saved in a ffserver.conf file. We can test it. Launch the server with this command line :<\/p>\nffserver -f ffserver.conf<\/pre>\nYou will have this output :<\/p>\n ffserver version 1.2.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the FFmpeg developers\r\nbuilt on Jun 24 2013 10:41:49 with Apple clang version 4.1 (tags\/Apple\/clang-421.11.65) (based on LLVM 3.1svn)\r\nconfiguration: --prefix=\/opt\/local --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libopus --enable-libtheora --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libmodplug --enable-libvpx --enable-libspeex --enable-libass --enable-libbluray --enable-gnutls --enable-libfreetype --mandir=\/opt\/local\/share\/man --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --cc=\/usr\/bin\/clang --arch=x86_64 --enable-yasm --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-nonfree --enable-libfaac\r\nlibavutil 52. 18.100 \/ 52. 18.100\r\nlibavcodec 54. 92.100 \/ 54. 92.100\r\nlibavformat 54. 63.104 \/ 54. 63.104\r\nlibavdevice 54. 3.103 \/ 54. 3.103\r\nlibavfilter 3. 42.103 \/ 3. 42.103\r\nlibswscale 2. 2.100 \/ 2. 2.100\r\nlibswresample 0. 17.102 \/ 0. 17.102\r\nlibpostproc 52. 2.100 \/ 52. 2.100\r\nWed Jul 3 14:02:01 2013 FFserver started.\r\n<\/pre>\nYour server is now up and running. We can push our first movie, in my case, I use the Sintel Movie<\/a> trailer. The ffmpeg command line read the video and push it to the feed we configured above.
\nffmpeg -i sintel.mp4 http:\/\/localhost:8090\/feed1.ffm[\/code]
\nNow you can launch your preferred player (in my case VLC) and try to stream the content : http:\/\/localhost:8090\/live.flv \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
Stream WebM<\/h2>\nOk we have now one FLV output stream. We will replace FLV stream by one new output : WebM (with Vorbis and VP6). We will re-used the ffserver.conf file and put this part :<\/p>\n
\r\n<Stream live.webm>\r\nFeed feed1.ffm\r\nFormat webm\r\n\r\nAudioCodec vorbis\r\nAudioBitRate 64\r\n\r\nVideoCodec libvpx\r\nVideoSize 720x576\r\nVideoFrameRate 25\r\nAVOptionVideo flags +global_header\r\nAVOptionVideo cpu-used 0\r\nAVOptionVideo qmin 10\r\nAVOptionVideo qmax 42\r\nAVOptionVideo quality good\r\nAVOptionAudio flags +global_header\r\nPreRoll 15\r\nStartSendOnKey\r\nVideoBitRate 400\r\n<\/Stream>\r\n<\/pre>\nRestart the server and push again the content. You can test the movie on Chrome or VLC with this url : http:\/\/localhost:8090\/live.webm<\/p>\n
Note: with WebM, you can create a kind of live stream if you loop on different ffmpeg command line.<\/p>\n
To conclude, we know ffmpeg as one of the most useful free encoder. Now, ffserver is a very interesting tool and deserve more time to test the different possibility of it.
\nHave fun with it ! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everybody knows ffmpeg the command line encoding tool but do you know ffserver ? ffserver\u00a0is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. With it, you can stream over HTTP, RTP and RSTP. Quick overview The concept is to use ffmpeg to push content to one server. This server will transcode streams and deliver to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,44,69,46],"tags":[49,95,96,77,97],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1544"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1894,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions\/1894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alkannoide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}