Category Archives: Analyse

Play with ffserver – a quick overview

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ffmpegEverybody 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.

Quick overview

The concept is to use ffmpeg to push content to one server. This server will transcode streams and deliver to the end-users.

FFServer map

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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Mistserver – Optimize the HTTP delivery via caching

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In the previous post, we looked the new features of MistServer (version 1.1).
varnishToday, 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.
varnish-mist
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MistServer – new features for the version 1.1

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mistserverI 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 →

REST cookbook

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A new small blog post where I sticked informations or links about Rest and Restful :a style of architecture for distributed softwares. This post will be updated each time I have new links.

Restful is stateless. The main goals of Restful architecture are scalability, availability and agnotiscs technologies between software (via an common interface). A new Internet draft is out, it names RESTful Authentication Pattern and will help to design your architecture.

If you will deploy this type of architecture, you can read this slideshare which give best practices to design API (a webinar is available too). To design a Restful architecture, you need to design your URI. There is another good document made by Apigee : Web API Design – Crafting interfaces that Developers love [PDF file]

Here is some examples of API architectures:

To conclude, there is a tool to assist you on your development : Rest-client. It’s a Java app (so cross-platform) to test your Restful webservices.

Release of cloud services to manage media contents

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The beginning of this year 2013 is full of news in the transcoding cloud world. The two main platforms announced the release of their own solutions :

I made some posts to introduce Azure Media Services (part 1, part 2) available after May  2012. Here is a quick overview to compare those different services.

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