November news

We've made a few significant updates in November.

First, Larix mobile SDK for iOS has been updated with a new feature - Auto Focus Lock (AF-L). Just long press anywhere in the preview, and AF is locked until you tap to re-focus.
Use this page to proceed with SDK license subscription.

Nimble Streamer has a few updates as well.

Published Icecast streams can now be processed in Nimble Streamer. Read this article to see how it's set up and find out more about audio streaming scenarios supported by Nimble Streamer.

If you face any artifacts when publishing streams via UDP to Nimble Streamer, read this post describing the steps to avoid them.

WMSPanel non-admin users can now be granted permission by account admins to control Nimble Streamer instances. Please read this article for more details.

Last but not least, if you use WMSPanel API to control Nimble instances, you may set up threshold notifications to be alerted when you make too many API requests and are close to reach the calls limit. Visit this page for details.

The last but not the least update: check the State of Streaming Protocols for November 2016.

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The State of Streaming Protocols - November 2016

WMSPanel team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols.

The metrics calculations are based on ~3.7 billion views. The stats are collected from 3100+ media servers (Nimble Streamer and Wowza).

Protocols share remain stable, i.e. HLS share is about 77% with RTMP around 12% and progressive download near 5%.

The State of Streaming Protocols, November 2016

You can compare that to October stats below.

Processing published Icecast in Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer has wide audio streaming feature set which includes both live and VOD. Live audio streaming covers both transmuxing and transcoding of Icecast pulled streams.

Now we're expanding this feature set by supporting the published Icecast sources which have MP3 or AAC codecs.

Current solution was tested with a number of existing Icecast publishing solutions, some of them are as follows:

• SAM Broadcaster PRO
• Ezstream
• IceS 0, visit this page to download ices-0.4.tar.gz which has MP3 support

Those tools' configuration files and sample playlists can be found in a separate githib repo in our account.

In our case the standard "source" login is used and the password is "secret" - just for demo purposes.

Let's see how it's set up for Nimble Streamer using WMSPanel.


First we need to define interfaces used for accepting published Icecast stream. Go to Nimble Streamer -> Live streams settings, choose your server from the drop down list and click on Interfaces tab.

List of interfaces

Now click on Add Icecast interface to see dialog as shown below.

Define Icecast interface

Add IP Address and Port here. Usually it's 8000 port and you may keep IP Address field blank if you need all IP addresses to be listened.

Now click on Applications tab to see the list of existing apps. Then click on Add application settings to define new app.

Adding new application for Icecast published stream

Here the application name will be "icecast", as defined in the configs. The login is "source" and password as "secret" - same as in configs.

Save settings to apply them to your servers.

Now the published Icecast stream will be available for playback or other actions within a few seconds once the settings are applied to the server. Now go to Nimble Streamer -> Live Streams menu to see the appeared incoming stream and then switch to Outgoing streams to see the result output. There you will be able to try playback and get the output stream URL for your further usage, as described in this article.

Further audio streaming options

Metadata - you can work with it using Nimble settings:

• Set up metadata passthrough for Icecast re-streaming;
• Set up passthrough during Live Transcoder usage;
• Setting custom meta tags for outgoing streams.

With Icecast/SHOUTcast streams being processed in via single transmuxing engine you may also use them in various scenarios like these mentioned below.

• Transform streams via Live Transcoder to change the bitrate, sample rate, volume and much more. Check this and this video as example of control UI.
• Use full variety of reporting features to know more about your audience and your streams' popularity and performance.
• Apply full featured Paywall framework for your audio streams.
• Use Icecast control API in case you'd like to handle behavior remotely.

Quality

Qosifire quality monitoring service allows tracking the availability of Icecast streams and perform silence detection.

Example

Online radio snapshot page shows how to use Nimble Streamer and other Softvelum products for building audio delivery.

Let us know if you have any suggestions or questions regarding audio streaming, we're opened for discussions.

Related documentation

Transmuxing Icecast, Audio streaming features of Nimble Streamer, Transmuxing RTMP to Icecast, Transmuxing MP3 to audio-only HLS, Icecast metadata tags support, Live Streaming features in Nimble,

Nimble Streamer control for non-admin WMSPanel users

Nimble Streamer can be controlled in two ways. First one is to change config files, the second one is to use WMSPanel as a web UI.

WMSPanel is the easiest way to manage your streaming infrastructure based on Nimble Streamer. You can access via any browser and apply settings to multiple servers.

Secure your account in 3 easy steps article gives more ideas about working securely in WMSPanel.

Usually only account admins could control Nimble Streamer behavior. Now, WMSPanel allows those admins to give permission to non-admin users for controlling Nimble Streamer instances. You can specify which servers they may control and then set up white label access to WMSPanel to change the look-and-feel on the panel in order to make it look like you need.

Let's see how you can give that access.

Go to Control -> Users management menu to see the list of current users.

Users list

Now click on Abilities link on the designated user line to see the following dialog.

Servers selection dialog

Here you can see the list of the servers which you have now in your account. Select those which you need to give access for and slick on Save.

After that, the selected user will be able to do all the setup of his/her Nimble Streamer instance, just like the account administrator.

Slice-wide permissions

You can also define permissions for all users in particular slice. Read this article for more details.

Two-factor authentication

Any WMSPanel user may enable two-factor authentication for his user account. Please read this article for more details.

If you have any questions about our feature set, please contact our helpdesk.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, Building streaming infrastructure, Live Streaming with Nimble Streamer,