The project is in an early stage. Already done:
- 80% Buffer Chain (slicing over buffer boundaries not well tested)
- 90% RTMP Chunk Stream (sending not well tested)
- 80% RTMP Message Stream (sending not well tested)
- 50% AMF (only deserializing; no AMF0 long string, AMF3 object; no references; no tests)
- 10% Base application support for connect, play, publish, pause, send, resume
Not yet begun:
- flv or h.264 handling
- Application callback support or similar
- SSL support
Not planned:
- Shared Objects
- Flash RPC (RTMP typeid 15 or 18)
- XML support
- In general: Just the minimum to for our use case (see below)
A simple streaming NetStream.play() and webcam recording NetStream.record()
server solution is needed for secure deferred sign language communication. Deferred means
a sign language analogue to mail: one sends a sign language message and does not expect
an immediate answer. This use case is a bit different from the majority of the available
web video deployments: the focus is secure recording and playback. A product like
YouTube does not need to worry about the privacy of the submitted or recorded videos,
for example.
And that's why a lot of the available software have a hidden limitation or other. It's difficult to find something which conforms to all the requirements of that use case and is cheap at the same time.
With node.js 0.6.0 onward the binary buffer is more powerful with binary data types (it understands IEEE 754 (Javascript Number or C double) out of the box). Additionally mtrude provides a buffer chain with the same interface as the binary buffer. With chunking data does not arrive in whole. Buffer Chain copies data or shims the access (I still don't know which is better, I am trying out a shim).
RTMP uses a Chunk Stream as a low-level TCP protocol and a Message Stream protocol
to multiplex messages onto a single ActionScript3 NetConnection instance.
mtrude's ChunkStream is a wrapper around a socket (or a bidirectional node.js
stream like a two-way pipe) and emits events like 'handshake' and 'chunk'.
mtrude's MessageStream agains wraps a ChunkStream and
emits 'message' events. MessageStream can again be wrapped by an RTMP
application.
RTMPS seems to come in two flavors: RTMP within an SSL tunnel or RTMP within an HTTPS tunnel, the former being preferred as it is simpler and more efficient. Flash players are a bit picky and seem to fall back to RTMP within HTTPS very soon.
Have a look in the examples subdirectory.
Sometimes these implementations are only partial implementations. Caveat emptor.
- Flash Media Server
- Red5
- crtmpserver
- librtmp
- node-amf, RTMP support incomplete
- AMF3 in AS3
- ArcusNode, RTMFP
tcpflow together with rtmptool allow easy and thorough examinations of rtmp connections.
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