DVR for fMP4 HLS with HEVC and AVC in Nimble Streamer

As our customers already know, Apple announced the support for fragmented MP4, or fMP4, in HTTP Live Streaming protocol.  Proper support is available in latest versions of Apple's operating systems.

Softvelum recently introduced live streaming fMP4 support in Nimble Streamer. It allows transmuxing of incoming streams with HEVC (H.265) and AVC (H.264) content. Nimble Streamer is the first software media server to have full support for fMP4 in HLS for live streaming scenarios.

Now we're the first to introduce full support for fMP4 DVR.

Nimble Streamer allows recording any incoming live streams with HEVC (H.265) and AVC (H.264) content to provide playback capabilities - with fragmented MP4 container in addition to existing MPEG2TS container.

The DVR setup is done the same way as before - read this DVR setup article for more details. It has no difference between AVC and HEVC content.

You can play fMP4 and MPEG2TS HLS DVR streams simultaneously with no need for additional settings - the only difference is in output URL. If you have a live stream name like

http://yourhost/live/stream/playlist.m3u8

then your MPEG2TS-based DVR stream URL will be

http://yourhost/live/stream/playlist_dvr.m3u8

To use fMP4 playback DVR stream, your URL will be

http://yourhost/live/stream/playlist_fmp4_dvr.m3u8

So you can provide proper links for different target device types according to their capabilities.

The ABR DVR stream for fMP4 would be played the same way - just specify ABR app name in URL with the same playlist name:

http://yourhost/live_abr/stream/playlist_fmp4_dvr.m3u8

Of course, it can also be used with MPEG2TS ABR streams.

With this new type of URL you can use all the same DVR features:

• recording of incoming streams;
• playback of recorded streams;
• playback for selected time range for EPG;
• time-shifted playback of recorded stream;
• time line browsing and playback;
• per-application and per-stream settings;
• split recording by threads and recording location.

Watch DVR recording and playback in Nimble Streamer tutorial to get familiar with the most used features.

That's it - feel free to use this new feature a let us know if you have any questions regarding this functionality.

Nimble Streamer also supports fMP4 for VOD HLS for both H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC content. It also supports ABR VOD via SMIL files. Read this article for more details.

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

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Related documentation

fMP4 live streaming support in Nimble Streamer, fMP4 for VOD HLS, DVR feature set, DVR time range selection, H.265 (HEVC) support in Nimble Streamer, Nimble Streamer, Live streaming scenarios, WMSPanel API reference, Export DVR to MP4, HLS support in Nimble Streamer, Codecs support in Nimble Streamer