Variable bitrate live streaming

This a small attempt to use a create a multiple protocol live streaming server which takes in a a video file and convert into both a HLS video format(time segment files & .m3u8 playlist) and MPEG-DASH format(.mpd manifest & .m4s chunks).

What are these protocols

Checkout my blog about it

How it works

The whole logic in wrapped around by a express.js based webserver. It uses the multer library to handle file uploads and store them locally. This is followed by a library fluent-ffmpeg which is a wrapper around ffmpeg the C based audio video manipulation library. We use a few ffmpeg functions to create a the required streams from the uploaded mp4, which are stored in the hls-Streams/<filename>/ and MPEG-DASH-Streams/<filename>/ folders which are added as static files for the server using express.static.

IMPORTANT

After the Streams are created the out.m3u8 playlist and .mpd Manifest files are edited to update the path of segments from relative path to the (HOST)/hls-Streams/<name>/<req> and (HOST)/MPEG-DASH-Streams/<name>/<req> , i.e, the static paths.

After this encoding, conversion and storing is done the files are served conditionally based on the useragent ( basically device and browser )

TODO:

• upload file web View
• Upload files
• Generate .ts segments
• Generate .m3u8 playlist
• Edit .m3u8 playlist to support streaming from server
• player webview
• lowdb for caching
• robust error handling
• It's either the below code not working or i am not able to glue the .mpd file to the player
• Generate MPEG-DASH .m4s segments and .mpd manifest file
• Adding resolution support of MPEG-DASH