November 2015 updates

In November, our team continued to make features and improvements.

Before diving into tech update, take a look at Selected Integrators webpage which shows a list of the companies that use our solutions for their customers, integrating our technologies into sophisticated streaming workflows. We recommend contacting these companies if you need help deploying or setting up our products in your environment.

A new version of Larix Broadcaster for iOS is now available in AppStore. Several significant improvements were made. Larix Broadcaster is based on mobile broadcasting library and its source is included in our mobile SDK.

RTSP republishing was added into Nimble Streamer in addition to existing RTSP feature set which already includes transmuxing of incoming streams and RTSP playback.

Nimble Streamer DVR feature set was significantly improved with a few new features:

• DVR time fragments requests were added to support EPGs and similar playback scenarios.
• ABR recording and playback is also supported now.
• WMSPanel API now has DVR control API capabilities to allow you to automate your streaming scenarios.

Speaking of WMSPanel API, it now has multiple streams real-time status API method for those customers who have multiple streams to be tracked simultaneously.

To see some other interesting information, take a look at The State of Streaming Protocols which
shows the growth of MPEG-DASH which overruns HDS, and increase of RTSP share after adding RTSP playback and re-streaming into Nimble Streamer.


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The State of Streaming Protocols - November 2015

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols.

The metrics calculations are based on nearly 2.1 billion views. The stats are collected from 2200+ media servers (Nimble Streamer and Wowza).

MPEG-DASH keeps growing, it had 8M+ views. It overruns Adobe HDS and it's getting closer to Microsoft SmoothStreaming. RTSP playback and re-streaming feature set gave a slight increase for this protocol with ~8% for now. HLS share is around 70% now.

The State of Streaming Protocols - November 2015.

You can compare that to October stats below.

RTSP republishing in Nimble Streamer

RTSP feature set is a popular among Nimble Streamer users that are performing in live streaming, especially directly from cameras. There are cases when the live stream needs to be delivered to edge or other origin servers in order to perform load balancing and build robust infrastructure.

For this case we have streams republishing support. It previously had RTMP support, and now it allows republishing RTSP.

If you have RTMP, RTSP or MPEG-TS incoming stream, you may publish it as RTMP or RTSP to any location that supports those two protocols.

Please refer to "RTMP and RTSP republishing via Nimble Streamer" article for set up details.

Contact us if you have any questions related to this or similar functionality.

DVR time fragments requests for EPG in Nimble Streamer

We've recently introduced the DVR feature set in Nimble Streamer which allows recording RTMP, RTSP, MPEG-TS, Icecast and SHOUTcast incoming streams for further playback.

One of the most anticipated scenarios of our customers is the ability to allow the playback the fragment in a specific time range. This is used for various use cases, especially in Electronic Program Guide (EPG) type of applications.

Nimble Streamer now supports time ranges for DVR playback. No special setup is needed. Follow general setup instruction to make settings and then use specially formed URL to get the content.

If your regular HLS DVR stream URL is

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr.m3u8

then your range URL would be like

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr_range-<UTC-start>-<duration>.m3u8

where "UTC-start" is the fragment start time as UTC epoch time and "duration" is the length of the fragment in seconds.

The same applies to MPEG-DASH DVR. If your regular URL is

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/manifest_dvr.mpd

then your range URL would be like

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/manifest_dvr_range-<UTC-start>-<duration>.mpd

Examples:

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr_range-1447069728-120.m3u8

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/manifest_dvr_range-1447069728-120.mpd 

It starts at given time and lasts for 2 minutes.

If you need to set up only the start time and allow continuous playback from that point, use "now" value for that, e.g.:

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr_range-1447069728-now.m3u8

fMP4 container

The URLs above will work for default MPEG2TS container. If you'd like use fMP4 container for DVR playback, you'll need to use "fmp4" suffix like this:

http://192.168.0.1:8081/live/music/playlist_fmp4_dvr_range-1447069728-120.m3u8

Adding that suffix will create DVR stream with fMP4 container.

Both MPEG2TS and fMP4 DVR streams can be played simultaneously. So you can provide your users with appropriate URLs depending on their device type.

Playback offset

When a player opens a playlist of a DVR which is still currently being recorded, most players will start the playback from some of the last chunks. This is because DVR stream is handled as "live" while it's in recording.

You can recommend players to start the playback from a certain time position by using #EXT-X-START:TIME-OFFSET=<time> tag in DVR chunk list.

Nimble Streamer allows specifying zero offset to define that tag. Use this URL specification:

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr_range-<UTC-start>-<duration>_offset-0.m3u8

to insert #EXT-X-START:TIME-OFFSET=0 tag. This will recommend a player to start its playback from the beginning of the chunklist. Here's an example:

http://your.domain.name/live/stream/playlist_dvr_range-1447069728-now_offset-0.m3u8

More DVR

Also, check time-shifted playback and thumbnails generation for Nimble DVR.

You may also control DVR via API in order to automate your streaming infrastructure. If you'd like to export DVR into MP4, you can check this instruction.

Also notice that HLS DVR streams can be added to SLDP HTML5 Player for rewinding low latency streams. Read this article for details.

Take a look at this video tutorial to get familiar with DVR most useful features.

Read other documentation articles for more details and full description of available options.

If you have any feedback or feature requests for DVR, just let us know about it.

Related documentation

DVR timeline browsing and playback, DVR feature set, Nimble Streamer, Live streaming feature set, DASH streaming,

DVR control API in WMSPanel

We've recently introduced the DVR feature set in Nimble Streamer which allows recording RTMP, RTSP and MPEG-TS incoming streams for further playback.

As you know, WMSPanel service has its own API for getting stats and controlling media server behavior.

So now we introduce API for controlling DVR:

• Get DVR settings list to start working with each of them.
• Get an existing DVR setting to get individual setting.
• Create a DVR setting
• Update a DVR setting
• Delete a DVR setting

This covers all basic operations over video recording in Nimble Streamer.

Contact us if you have any questions or feedback about our API.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, HLS live streaming, DASH streaming, DVR feature set, WMSPanel API,

Introducing selected integrators

Our team has a number of products that help people build their streaming infrastructure. Some of them need efforts to deploy and implement, such as Nimble Streamer installation, setup and usage, paywall capabilities or mobile broadcasting.

There are companies that have been using and deploying our technologies for some time already. We've created a separate page presenting the list of those partners.

Feel free to contact them directly if you need advanced services while deploying our products.

Contact us if you'd like to join the list of our selected integrators.