Live Stream : Fundamentals

Requirements

• FFMPEG with h264 codec

Server (To be hosted on AWS)

Has two components

• Encoder: Listens on port 5050 for video stream, and encodes it to live folder using HLS encoding, with adaptive bit rate. (Creates video chunk .ts files of 1 second each.)
• CDN Simulator: Hosts the live folder on port 8080. Ideally the files inside the live folder needs to be uploaded to S3, which will be frontended by a CDN like CloudFront or Akamai. (The .m3u8 files are re-generated every second, hence the CDN must be configured, not to cache them).

Camera

• Publisher: Run it from a laptop which has direct access to the camera. It publishes the video stream to the server(Encoder), on port 5050

How to Run

1. cd server
2. ./encode.sh
3. ./simulate-cdn.sh
4. cd ../camera
5. ./publish.sh

(Sequencing matters)

Hardware Accelerating FFmpeg

FFmpeg encoding on CPU slows down, as the number of parallel streams for adaptive bit rate increases. Hardware acceleration is required to achieve near real-time performance.

1. Spin off an AWS G3 Nvidia GPU Instance (These are very costly instances, so run them only when the live stream is on)
2. Install Nvidia drivers
3. Install CUDA
4. Compile FFmpeg with CUDA

(Refer Dockerfile)

Demo

Demo Link

Safari on Mac & iOS shows a "Live Broadcast" indicator in the player