Nimble Streamer supports multiple streaming techniques. Edge HLS re-streaming is one of the most popular cases. If you have HLS origin you can install several edge servers to improve robustness of your streaming infrastructure. So this use case is very popular among our users.
We continuously improve our user interface to simplify products usage so today we announce the HLS re-streaming wizard.
If you don't have Nimble installed, perform the installation. Now you need to tell your new server what it should do.
Choose Nimble Streamer / Edit Nimble Routes menu to open routes editing page. Now click on Re-streaming wizard button.
You will see a dialog where you can enter your origin stream URL and select which Nimble Streamer needs to process this stream.
Easy HLS re-streaming setup.
Once you specify both items you can see example of stream URL as available from edge server.
Now you can click on Create re-streaming route to perform it. You will see new route in list of routes.
Now you can use the example which you saw in the wizard or click on Get URL for player to see it.
If you find any other difficulties, just let us know about it, we're ready to help and improve our UI.
RTMP (Realtime Messaging Protocol) still remains very popular for live streaming. However more and more devices become capable of HLS with no RTMP support. So they need to get live streams with all quality profiles provided by live stream RTMP source.
Nimble Streamer allows transmuxing RTMP into HLS with both single quality and adaptive bitrate if it's provided by the streaming source. Currently the H.264 codec is supported. To set up this transmuxing you need an instance of Nimble Streamer and a video source that will push a stream to that instance.
First you may take a look at video tutorial about RTMP setup.
1. Install Nimble Streamer
Installing Nimble is easy. Just follow this easy instruction to install and register Nimble Streamer instance in WMSPanel for further setup. You will see Nimble in servers list.
2. Define application for incoming streams
First you need to describe an application used to process data from streaming source. This application will have settings for a group of incoming streams. This will include authorization and chunks duration.
Go to Nimble Streamer / Live streams settings menu. Global tab has service-wise default Chunk duration for all outgoing HLS streams. It also has Push login and password for applied to all incoming RTMP publishing by default.
These settings can be overlapped by individual applications settings. Click on Applications tab to see list of individual apps.
Click on Add application settings to see a dialog for adding new app setting.
As you see it has application name, chunk duration setting and then publishing login and password.
Notice that you may also select multiple protocols which will be used as output. Just check those which you need for your streaming scenarios - they'll be available for output.
To start receiving data you need to define which interfaces will server listen to. Click on Interfaces tab to see list of defined interfaces.
Click on the "Add RTMP interface" button. To have Nimble get published RTMP, you need to add IP and port to listen to. If you don't specify IP, server will listen to all interfaces on given port. You can add any number of interfaces this way. Make sure interface is not bound by other program.
Once the interface is defined, you may publish media to Nimble.
3. Start publishing
Now you can start streaming from your media source, like FLME, FFMPEG, Wowza or any other encoder with RTMP support. Use application or server credentials which you defined on step 2.
Setting up live stream in FMLE.
If you use encoders which do not support FMLE-like authentication, check this article describing URL authentication RTMP publishing to Nimble Streamer.
4. Define outgoing streams
Once the incoming streams accepted by Nimble, you will see the outgoing stream available in Outgoing streams page. Click on Outgoing link or Outgoing section on the streaming scheme picture.
List of HLS streams transmuxed from RTMP.
Here you can see result streams available for your viewers. You can see its basic parameters of video and audio stream as well as bandwidth and resolution. To use the outgoing stream, click on URL for Player to see dialog showing stream in popular players, their sample code and all URLs to insert into client's player.
5. Defining adaptive bitrate
If you have several streaming sources you can combine them into HLS ABR streams. Read this article for all details regarding ABR setup and usage.
6. DVR - recording and playback
RTMP may be recorded for further playback via HLS and MPEG-DASH using the DVR feature set. Read this article for setup details.
7. Transcoding
If you need to change content parameters, like change the bitrate, use our Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer to transform. It has high performance and low resource usage.
8. Server-side ads insertion
When transmuxing incoming RTMP streams, you can use Nimble Advertizer for server-side ads insertion. It provides a framework for inserting pre-roll and mid-roll ads into live streams for further output via RTMP, SLDP and Icecast with custom business logic and per-user ads.
Visit Advertizer web page to find out more.
What's next
As you can see WMSPanel provides easy way of configuring HLS streams with few manual actions.
You may also pull RTMP by Nimble to make HLS. It will also be available for ABR HLS setup.
Internet service provider is one of the key elements of delivery chain between a media hoster and a viewer. WMSPanel provides many metrics regarding a viewer and our customers want to know about the way the content is delivered.
WMSPanel now has ISP network report available under Reporting menu. It collects information about telecom operators and shows their names along with connections number information. You may select dates range to report as well as export data as CSV and view printer-friendly version.
This report is enabled as part of additional daily reporting set which also includes geo-location report. It's available per slice, meaning that the report shows collection of data defined by particular slice.
Internet service providers reports.
This page shows chart chart for top 10 telecoms with 11th part showing the "long tail" of companies with small share. Companies list below shows their names, connections count and their share. By default it shows top 20 with ability to show all companies, top 100 and also define filter by name.
If you'd like to see some other reports, tell us about it. New reporting features are being implemented all the time, so your feedback is welcomed.
Nimble Streamer is designed and implemented to be very light-weight and fast. It consumes a very small amount of RAM and CPU to operate in compare to majority of other tools and servers. Since it's targeted to serve high load, there may be a point when Nimble exceeds its resources. An administrator needs to be aware of that to make scale up the infrastructure by either adding more CPU/RAM or adding more servers to pass the load.
WMSPanel provides nice charts for CPU and RAM usage for each server so any moment a system admin may go to server details page and check what's going on. Now we've made next step and WMSPanel now allows setting up a level of CPU and RAM consumption to notify admins emails about resources overrun.
The set up takes two steps.
1. Define limits
You need to define the thresholds for alerting an administrator. Click on Servers menu to go to servers list and click on Edit for designated Nimble server.
Set up CPU and RAM limit to alert admin.
Here you can select levels of CPU and RAM from the drop down list. Once the limit is reached, an email notification is sent to the emails which are set up on the step 2. These alerts will be sent once per hour if the consumption is still over the limit.
2. Set up notifications
To receive alerts you need to specify emails which need to be notified. Go to Control / Offline notifications set up menu to see the setup page.
Set up email addresses for notifications.
Here you will add or remove the email addresses and will be able to test them.
Now if any of the limits is overrun, the email is sent out as described in "Define limits" section above.
