HDS re-streaming support

Nimble Streamer has been handling re-streaming of the most popular HTTP-based protocols since the early days. These protocols were HLS, progressive download and then SmoothStreaming.

Now we introduce re-streaming for HTTP Dynamic Streaming, or HDS. It was created by Adobe for HTTP delivery of adaptive streaming. Nimble Streamer handles it using the same efficient caching system as we use for HLS and SMOOTH.

The main advantages of using Nimble as an edge server for HDS re-streaming are:

• Load balancing of big amounts of incoming connections via light-weight edges.
• Hot-linking protection of HDS streams.
• Variety of statistics reports available for Nimble Streamer.
• Low cost of ownership as Nimble is a freeware.

With these major benefits all you need to start is to sign up to WMSPanel, install Nimble Streamer and specify which HDS requests must be re-streamed to origin and properly cached.

Follow these easy steps.

1. Install Nimble Streamer on your Linux server using this procedure.

2. Go to Nimble Streamer / Edit Nimble Routes menu to open routes page

Here you will see the list of existing routes or just an empty list. In our example you see a route for VOD streaming which is used in our Nimble Streamer demo page.

Nimble Streamer routes list.

3. Click on Add re-streaming route to see the following dialog.

HLS, SmoothStre and HDS re-streaming set up dialog.

So now you need to define which requests are going to be handled and where will Nimble take the original stream from. Let assume your origin HDS stream is located at this URL:

http://yourdomain.com:1935/live/stream/manifest.f4m

We have 4 servers in our pool but we want just one of them to handle the requests. By default Nimble is listening to port 8081 on all available interfaces. You can change it using config file but for this example we'll use default settings (all IPs and ports) and will have Nimble get all incoming requests for /live/* streams and re-stream them form origin location.

Check the following picture to see proper settings for it.

Re-streaming interfaces and paths for HDS re-streaming example.

Now you need to specify which servers will be handling this request. You may apply the setting to any Nimble server available in your account. We will select just one of them.

Selecting Nimble Streamer instance to handle HDS re-streaming.

Now when you click on OK the route is applied to designated Nimble instance. You may access your HDS stream using the following URL:

http://ny2.video.wmspanel.com:8081/live/stream/manifest.f4m

Here you see full domain name, default port and full path identical to what you see at the origin.

If you want robust and scalable re-streaming, you may want to use this how-to article explaining HLS scalable streaming to use it for HDS. The routes set up and DNS settings will be pretty much the same.

Contact our team in case you have some sophisticated streaming scenarios you'd like to cover or if you have any questions regarding Nimble Streamer set up.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming, Pay-per-view for Nimble Streamer, Load balancing and failover with Nimble Streamer, Geo-location load balancing with Nimble,