2018 summary

The New Year of 2019 is approaching so it's time to look back at what Softvelum has accomplished.
We've had an interesting year as you will find out below.

First, take a look at a few numbers in our State of Streaming Protocols for 2018, our customers stream more each year and we're excited to see continuous connections number growth.

We had a couple of publications which you may find interesting:

• Tools for tailor-made streaming white paper describes what we do and who may benefit from our products.
• Jan Ozer published How to Create a Live HLS Feed With HEVC article describing an HLS fMP4/HEVC use case setup in Nimble Streamer, as our company was the first one to support that container/codec tandem among software media servers. This article is also a good sequel to his Nimble Streamer review article published in 2017.

Speaking of streaming use cases, this year we started making series of "snapshots" to show how Softvelum products can be used for real-life streaming scenarios. As example, check first case study with mobile-to-mobile delivery chain or "power origin" approach to building CDN. Let us know if you'd like to see more scenarios covered like that.

Nimble Advertizer

The biggest start of this year is Nimble Advertizer. It's a live streaming server-side ads insertion (SSAI) framework for Nimble Streamer media server.

Key features of Advertizer are:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection.
• Mid-roll ads flexible timing setup.
• Per-stream ads insertion business logic.
• Personalized ads based on users' IDs.

Advertizer supports HLS, RTMP, SLDP and Icecast protocols output. It supports both video+audio and audio-only modes. Advertizer may use all input live protocols supported by Nimble Streamer, which are RTMP, RTSP, SRT, UDT, HLS, MPEG2TS, Icecast and SHOUTcast.

The workflow is easy to adopt within any business logic:

1. Nimble Streamer media server processes incoming streams to get the content.
2. Nimble Advertizer calls your handler web application to get business logic description.
3. Advertizer gets files with advertisements to process them via Nimble Streamer according to your logic defined via handler.
4. Nimble inserts the ads into original media and packages it into output protocol.
5. End user connects to Nimble and gets the stream containing original content mixed with advertisements.
6. Playback is running smooth regardless of ads insertion over time in any player which supports the output protocol.

You can read full technical spec for more information. Also Nimble Advertizer demo shows simple ad insertion scenarios for HLS/RTMP/SLDP/Icecast in action, with all setup details.

SLDP

Softvelum Low Delay Protocol was introduced in 2017 and this year it's been widely adopted among our customers as a replacement for RTMP low latency delivery.
It's now gaining momentum since Adobe announced that it's going to decline Flash in 2020 which will cause elimination of Flash-based RTMP playback. Major browsers will also decline its usage in 2020 so those who need to have low latency real-time streaming, will have to choose other technologies.

SLDP is a great replacement with its sub-second latency, buffer control, adaptive bitrate and multiple codecs support. Based on WebSockets, it allows playback on MSE-enabled browsers with our HTML5 player, as well as mobile playback on iOS and Android devices with our free apps. Early next year we'll introduce more details on transition from RTMP to SLDP for your ultra-low latency, so stay tuned for our blog and social networks.

Meanwhile, CDNs start adding WebSockets support which allows SLDP delivery natively through their networks. Take a look at CloudFront WebSockets delivery setup with Nimble Streamer as example of such support.

We've been improving SLDP protocol through this year to make it a great solution for RTMP playback replacement.

Nimble Streamer

Besides Advertizer and SLDP, Nimble Streamer also got a number of improvements.

The aforementioned Jan Ozer article How to Create a Live HLS Feed With HEVC refers to fMP4 container support for live streaming. In addition to fMP4 support for live streams, Nimble now has VOD support for fMP4 HLS. So if your customers use latest iOS version, you could use that container for both live and VOD to optimize your distribution costs.

Our customers have been requesting more features regarding end-users connections control. Nimble Streamer now supports sessions authorization via external handler to decide which of the connecting users may continue receiving the stream. Player connects to Nimble Streamer instance via any stream URL, then Nimble reaches the external handler which returns response to define further behavior of the server.
This gives even bigger flexibility to paywall feature set which allows building monetization solution for your content.

Nimble Streamer now has DVR thumbnails generation as JPG files and as single-frame MP4 files, this helps showing preview for any point in recorded stream.

Mobile products

Our mobile solutions are being improved all the time following customers' feedback.

Larix mobile SDK now supports SRT streaming from Android and iOS devices. Nimble Streamer had SRT support for a couple of years so far, so adding that protocol to a mobile publishing SDK has been highly anticipated.

Modern devices are getting support for HEVC (H.265) encoding, so Larix apps and SDKs have support for it as well. You'll need to use RTSP or SRT protocols as a transport for it, as RTMP has no HEVC support.

Latest mobile devices also have high frame rate, e.g. 60fps, so Larix has that for both for iOS and Android on those devices which have that feature support. On Android phones you can now select fixed or variable frame rates, depending on current device capabilities - that's crucial for some transcoding solutions.

SLDP Player for Android and iOS now has Icecast support to give playback capabilities for numerous online radios.
In case you use HTML5 browser player on iOS and have any issues, take a look at SLDP iOS Player fallback setup.

Minor improvements and updates were continuously added to both products during entire year.


We have a couple of new products to deliver for you next year, so stay tuned for updates and we'll continue providing the best possible improvements to help you grow your business.

Our team wishes you a Happy New Year!

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 summary

Softvelum team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. It's based on stats from WMSPanel reporting service which handles data from Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer servers.

In 2018, WMSPanel collected data about 48 billion views.
We also added a new metric - total view time for our server products. It's nearly 6.7 billion hours.
On average, there were 3600 to 3900 servers under WMSPanel observation at any moment of time.

Let's take a look at the chart and numbers of this quarter:

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018

DVR JPEG thumbnails in Nimble Streamer

DVR feature set in Nimble Streamer covers the majority of use cases for streams recording and playback, its setup is described in this article.

We've recently introduced MP4 snapshots of DVR stream which you may use directly via URL or certain kind. MP4 output was chosen over JPG images due to resources usage. MP4 frame can be extracted and inserted into MP4 container with relatively small amount of CPU and RAM. Thumbnails are generated as .mp4 files containing a single key frame. This allows inserting thumbnail in any modern browser using <video> element.

When it comes to saving still image snapshots via JPG, it requires frame decoding and encoding into proper format. That's why you'll need Nimble Streamer Live Transcoder to be available at your DVR server.

Install Live Transcoder and enable thumbnails

Nimble Streamer uses decoding and encoding libraries from Nimble Live Transcoder to get the image from the stream and then encode it into JPG.
So to get his feature working, first you need to install Live Transcoder and subscribe for a license. Once you've installed Live Transcoder and registered the purchased license, you can enable this feature in DVR settings.

Go to Nimble Streamer menu and click on Live streams settings. Once you open settings, go to DVR tab to see your DVR settings. To enable JPG thumbnails, open your stream DVR setting, click on Advanced settings and scroll to Generate JPEG thumbnails checkbox.

Enabling JPG thumbnails generation.

Check that box to enable the feature and use Thumbnail width and Thumbnail height edit boxes to specify dimensions of images. If you leave them as 0, Nimble will save full-size images. If you specify exact values, they will be used for every thumbnail. Another option is to specify only one of those dimensions, in this case, the image will have both sides proportional to each other. E.g. if you set up Thumbnail height to 480 with width set to 0, this will produce thumbnails with 480 height and proportional width, whatever it is for the original image.

Once you start recording any stream via DVR with the feature enabled, it will generate a JPG thumbnail for every recorded segment, its length is defined during the DVR setup. A thumbnail will be a key frame picture at the start of the corresponding segment. Notice that thumbnail generation takes time depending on your hardware so for large resolutions it might take a few seconds. However small resolutions on powerful hardware will allow generating it within a split of a second.

Get thumbnails

Now when DVR is working and pictures are generated continuously, you can get them using the followings URLs.

Latest available thumbnail can be obtained using this type of URL:

http://<server>/<app>/<stream>/dvr_thumbnail.jpg

If you'd like to get specific time spot, add Unix epoch time stamp:

http://<server>/<app>/<stream>/dvr_thumbnail_<epoch_time>.jpg

E.g. http://serverip/live/stream/dvr_thumbnail_1542708934.jpg. In this case Nimble Streamer will return a key frame image at the start of the corresponding segment.

Optimization

If you see that your DVR thread is consuming too much resources, you can add working threads by using thumbnail_transmuxer_threads parameter. Read this reference page for more details about Nimble configuration. By default, this parameter's value is "1".

You may also find useful the API call for DVR export to MP4.

If you have any questions on this or other features, let us know.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, Live streaming scenarios, DVR feature set, DVR setup for Nimble Streamer, Watch DVR recording and playback in Nimble Streamer video tutorial

Using Amazon CloudFront for SLDP delivery

Live streaming is growing these days and a lot of its use cases require sub-second delay between image capture and its display on user's device.
That includes online chatting, betting and bidding, gaming, security and surveillance - all of them demand real-time picture to make the immediate response.

With the decline of Flash and RTMP as the main way to view live streams, the industry has been looking for new ways to deliver the media close to real-time.

Softvelum has developed SLDP, a last-mile delivery protocol for end-user devices to cover real-time demand. It's key features are:

• Up to two-seconds delay between origin and player.
• Multiple codecs support: it can deliver whatever your end-user platform can play, e.g. H.264, VP8, VP9, H.265/HEVC.
• Adaptive bitrate support for delivering multiple resolutions and qualities.

Nimble Streamer software media server has full support for SLDP and its features. You can read this article to check how Nimble Streamer may take incoming live streams and produce SLDP based on that input.

SLDP playback is supported by SLDP Player. On Android and iOS, it's a native mobile application, while browser payback is covered by HTML5 JavaScript player working in any MSE- and MMS-enabled browser. All three players can be customized via respective SDKs.

Amazon CloudFront setup

SLDP is a streaming protocol based on WebSockets so it can be delivered via both HTTP and HTTPS on top of TCP.  This makes SLDP pervasive across any networks, including CDNs which support WebSockets.

Recently Amazon CloudFront announced full support for WebSockets. This allows AWS users to use all benefits of this delivery network to get all benefits of SLDP live streaming. If you're not yet familiar with AWS CloudFront, please check this page to get started.
CloudFront WebSockets setup is easy and seamless - you can complete it within a few minutes. In our example below we assume you will use ultimatemediastreaming.com domain for accessing your media streams. We'll add it into distribution settings and then use for further playback.

Notice that CloudFront does not cache WebSockets traffic. It serves only as a network for an optimal delivery.

Go to your AWS Management Console and find CloudFront in AWS services.

Find CloudFront service

You will be redirected to CloudFront Distributions control page.

CloudFront Distributions list

Here you need to click on Create Distribution button to proceed. You will be brought to Step 1 to select your delivery method for your content.

Click on Get started for Web delivery method.

You will need Web method so just click on Get started button. You will go to Step 2 to enter details.

Enter your domain.

This page has a lot of delivery parameters. However, with SLDP you don't need any of that except for Origin Domain Name field. Here you need to enter the domain name which you will map output stream to. In our example it's "ultimatemediastreaming.com" as mentioned previously. Your Origin ID will be generated automatically. You may also specify custom ports of origin server if you need to.

Now scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Create distribution.

Click on Create Distribution button to complete the process. You will then be taken back to distributions list.

Distribution is ready.

CloudFront will take some time to propagate setting across their network, but it won't take a few seconds. Once it's done, copy the Domain Name field value. In our example it's d1qarwymuxges8.cloudfront.net.

SLDP playback

Now CloudFront will take all requests from your viewers and take then to your Nimble Streamer instance.

So now all you need is to set up SLDP output from Nimble Streamer in case you haven't done this yet. Read more about how you can take input from various protocols with Open Broadcaster Studio, Larix Broadcaster and Haivision encoders as examples.

Once you have your SLDP ready, its full playback URL will be like

ws://x.x.x.x/liva_app/live_stream

Here "x.x.x.x" is your IP address and you can replace app name and stream name with your values. Then you map your IP to your origin domain name used in CloudFront settings. This will be like

ws://ultimatemediastreaming.com/live_app/live_stream

Since you've created a distribution in CloudFront, your stream will be available using these final URLs:

ws://d1qarwymuxges8.cloudfront.net/live_app/live_stream 

wss://d1qarwymuxges8.cloudfront.net/live_app/live_stream

The "ws://" prefix is for HTTP and "wss://" is for HTTPS.
You can use these URLs in any of your SLDP players. Your stream will be seamlessly delivered via CloudFront CDN.

Further steps

Now when you've set up low latency transmission, you can try fine-tuning it.

Key frame interval is the first option you could try, it affects the start-up time for a stream as well as switch time for adaptive bitrate stream. The less key frame interval is, the sooner a player will start the playback. Key frame interval is defined in encoder. Here's an example of how key frame interval and alignment can be set in Nimble Live Transcoder.

If you use our free HTML5 SLDP player parameters you may try playing with offset parameter to see how it works in your conditions with your key frame interval. Read this article for more details.

You may also find our SLDP FAQ useful. It clarifies some questions that our customers face when they try SLDP.

If you have further questions regarding SLDP or any other Softvelum technology, please contact us.

Related documentation

SLDP protocol, Nimble Streamer, SLDP setup in Nimble Streamer, Getting started with CloudFront

Playback session authorization in Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer paywall features provide a lot of ways of controlling the end-user connection including hotlink protection and pay-per-view which give advanced capabilities but require to sign the stream playback URL on your web page. Other features like geo-location and IP-range block, User-Agent and Referrer fields block require to be pre-configured via WMSPanel.

To give more flexibility, Nimble Streamer now supports sessions authorization via external handler to decide which of the connecting users may continue receiving the stream. The workflow is simple:

1. Player client software connects to Nimble Streamer instance via any stream URL.
2. Nimble Streamer keeps the connection and reaches the external handler, sending all details of this new session.
3. Handler returns response to define further behavior of Nimble Streamer.

Each response has its code in header and body:

• Code 200 response means the stream can be played by this client.
• Code 302 makes Nimble Streamer to redirect the client to a specified URL.
• Code 403 means that this user session is forbidden.

The supported protocols are as follows.

• Live streaming: HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC WHEP, SLDP, Icecast and MPEG-TS.
• VOD streaming: HLS, MPEG-DASH and Progressive download.
• Cache-aware re-streaming: HLS, MPEG-DASH, HDS, SmoothStreaming and Progressive download.

Here's how you can use this.

Enable feature

To enable this playback authentication feature, you need to click Control -> API setup top menu. Then you may either go to Global push API tab to define setting for all sever or to Servers push API tab to define per-server setting.

Opening either of those you can scroll down to Auth handler URL section.

Auth handler URL field sets up the URL for your handler web application.

Protected apps is a list of applications to be protected with the handler. You can add or remove apps using removal icon and "Add protected app" link. If you don't specify exact names then all applications will be protected.

Concurrency defines a number of simultaneous requests to handler to perform at a time.

Allow by default defines if clients should be allowed in case authorization handler becomes unavailable.

Message for handler

Your handler needs to be a web application available via specified URL.

The following JSON message is sent by Nimble Streamer to this handler in POST request body:

{"host":"<host>", "url":"<stream URL>","ip":"<client IP>","user-agent": <User-Agent header> , "referer": <Referer header>, "session_id": <Nimble session ID> , "session_type": <protocol name>}

You can see the meaning of most fields' from the line above. The session_type field value may be one of the following: "HLS", "DASH", "HDS", "SMOOTH", "PD", "ICECAST", "MPEGTS" and "SLDP".

Response from handler

The handler needs to return a JSON with one of the following bodies.

Allow connection:

{"return_code":200}

This means that current client may start receiving the stream in this session.

Redirection:

{"return_code":302,"redirect_location":"http://127.0.0.1:8081/content/blocked.mp4/playlist.m3u8"}

This response body will make Nimble start streaming another stream instead of the one requested initially, i.e. this is a redirection. This is useful if you'd like to show some stub for un-authorized client or if a requested stream is not yet available.

Forbidden:

{"return_code":403}

This response means this stream is forbidden for this particular client session.

Example

Check an example of playback authorization handler which checks URL and prevents playback of chunklist.m3u8 and redirects to playlist.m3u8.

Another approach: set sessions via native direct API

You can also get sessions data and delete un-wanted connection using direct native HTTP API of Nimble Streamer. Read this article for more details.

Stay tuned for updates and let us know if you have any questions on this feature set.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer paywall features, SLDP low latency streaming, Live streaming features, VOD features

DVR MP4 thumbnails in Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer software media server has it DVR feature set which covers the majority of use cases for streams recording and playback.

DVR setup is described in this article and you're probably already familiar with it. Now, to get snapshots of DVR stream, you may use direct URL described below.

Notice that thumbnails are generated as .mp4 files containing a single keyframe. This allows inserting thumbnail in any modern browser using <video> element.

If you'd like to generate JPG thumbnails, please read this article.

The latest thumbnail can be obtained using the following URL:

http://<server>/<app>/<stream>/dvr_thumbnail.mp4

If you'd like to get specific time spot, add epoch time:

http://<server>/<app>/<stream>/dvr_thumbnail_<utc>.mp4

E.g. http://serverip/live/stream/dvr_thumbnail_1542708934.mp4

This feature is enabled by default and if you'd like to disable it, use this parameter in Nimble Streamer config file:

dvr_thumbnails_enabled = false

MP4 output was chosen over PNG or JPG images due to resources usage. MP4 frame can be extracted and inserted into MP4 container with relatively small amount of CPU and RAM. Still image capture requires frame decoding and encoding into proper format which needs extra resources. Our customers like Nimble Streamer primarily because of its high performance and we'd like to keep it that way.

Take a look at this video tutorial to see MP4 thumbnails in action and get familiar with DVR most useful features.

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

You may also find useful the API call for DVR archive export to MP4.

If you have any questions on this or other features, let us know.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, Live streaming scenarios, DVR feature set, DVR setup for Nimble Streamer, 

White Paper: Tools for tailor-made streaming

We're excited to announce our latest white paper published at Broadband TV News news web site.

It's called Softvelum: Tools for tailor-made streaming and you can download it by filling out the form on its webpage.


Let us know of your thoughts on this article, tell us what else you'd like to read about.

Recent failures analysis

Recently WMSPanel web service had 2 major malfunctions which affected our customers. This is the first time we had that kind of strong impact in years.

We'd like to share more information about those issues.

We created WMSPanel failures status page which has description of recent malfunctions or incidents happened to our infrastructure. We'll keep updating it in case if anything else happens.

We apologize for all inconveniences caused by the described malfunctions. As we described above, we made proper adjustments to our infrastructure to avoid various types of failures.

Unfortunately, nothing is perfect so we know that our hosting infrastructure will give us some hard time going forward. However, we continuously mitigate those possibilities which gives us strong optimism for the future of our services.

Softvelum Q3 news

During the third quarter of 2018 our team was working on improving our products.

Before checking the updates, take a look at the State of Streaming Protocols for Q3 2018. Total view time of our server software among all of customers was 21 million hours watched every day.

Nimble Advertizer

HLS ads insertion

Major improvement was made for Nimble Advertizer, the Server-Side Ads Insertion (SSAI) framework for Nimble Streamer. This framework allows dynamically insert personalized ads into live streaming content.
Key features of Advertizer are:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection
• Mid-roll ads flexible timing setup
• Per-stream ads insertion business logic
• Personalized ads based on your user IDs

Now Advertizer supports HLS live streams output in addition to currently supported RTMP, SLDP and Icecast protocols. It supports both video+audio and audio-only modes. Advertizer may use all input live protocols supported by Nimble Streamer, which are RTMP, RTSP, SRT, UDT, HLS, MPEG2TS, Icecast and SHOUTcast.

The workflow is easy to adopt within any business logic using your own handler app.

You can read full technical spec here.

Advertizer Live Demo

You can see SSAI in action on our Nimble Advertizer Live Demo page. It has RTMP, SLDP. HLS and Icecast live streams with pre-rolls and mid-rolls being inserted for you.

That page also has description of how this demo works so you could try the same approach in your solutions.

Nimble Advertizer Server-side Ads Insertion framework is a premium functionality which requires additional payments. Please check this page to get more details about functionality and pricing.

SLDP

Upcoming 2019 is the last year of Adobe's support for Flash technology which means upcoming decline of RTMP for end-user streaming. This brings the need for real-time low-latency streaming solution which could be used for live delivery and playback.

This year Softvelum introduced SLDP - Softvelum Low Delay Protocol. SLDP is a streaming protocol based on WebSockets. Its basic features include

• Sub-second delay between origin and player.
• Codec-agnostic: H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP8, VP9, AAC, MP3.
• ABR support: close-to-instant channels switch.
• HTTP and HTTPS on top of TCP.
• Buffer offset support.

Clients are currently available for HTML5 web pages, Android and iOS both as free players and premium SDKs.

Server support is available in Nimble Streamer. From setup perspective, it's just another option for your output streams. Read this article for full details on SLDP setup in Nimble.

Softvelum continuously improves SLDP technology by adding new features and updates. Feel free to try it out for your solutions, or just check Nimble Advertizer Live Demo to see SLDP in action with ads insertion.

Mobile solutions

We're updating our mobile streaming solutions on a regular basis, introducing new capabilities and fixes.

Larix free mobile app and premium SDKs for Android and iOS now have HEVC (H.265) encoding support for better compression of outgoing streams.  Also, SRT library in Larix is now version 1.3.1. Those features bring more robustness on unreliable networks and low bandwidth.
iOS Larix also has 60 fps support.

Restream.io has a new article in their help center called Stream From Mobile Using Larix Broadcaster. It's about Larix setup for using Restream.io services.

SLDP Player apps and SDKs had minor improvements and fixes as well.

You can check full description of releases and get SDK subscription any time.


We'll keep you updated on our latest features and improvements.
Stay tuned for more updates and follow us at Facebook and Twitter to get latest news and updates of our products and services.

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q3

Softvelum team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. It's based on stats from WMSPanel reporting service which handles data from Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer servers - there were 3600+ servers on average this quarter. WMSPanel collected data about more than 13 billion views.

We've added a new metric - total view time for our server products. It's nearly 1.9 billion this quarter, or 21+ million view hours per day.

Let's take a look at the chart and numbers of this quarter:

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q3

You can see HLS share as 69% and RTMP at 17% while progressive download still going down.

You can compare that to the picture of Q2 streaming protocols landscape:

Vote for Softvelum in 2018 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

The voting for 2018 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards is now opened.

Softvelum is nominated in 3 categories and we appreciate all of our customers and partners to vote for its products!


First, go to voting page here and introduce yourself to Streaming Media website to start voting.

You will find our products in the following categories:

1. Encoding Software - Nimble Live Transcoder
2. Media Server - Nimble Streamer
3. Video Player Solution/SDK - SLDP Player

This article describes all categories and the voting process.

After voting closes on Monday, September 21, you will receive an email asking you to confirm your vote. If you do not confirm your vote, the vote will not be counted so please follow up with Streaming Media email to count your vote!

HLS support in Nimble Advertizer SSAI

Earlier this year Softvelum introduced Nimble Advertizer, the Server-Side Ads Insertion (SSAI) framework for Nimble Streamer. This framework allows dynamically insert personalized ads into live streaming content.

Key features of Advertizer are:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection
• Mid-roll ads flexible timing setup
• Per-stream ads insertion business logic
• Personalized ads based on your user IDs

Now Advertizer supports HLS live streams output in addition to currently supported RTMP, SLDP and Icecast protocols. It supports both video+audio and audio-only modes. Advertizer may use all input live protocols supported by Nimble Streamer, which are RTMP, RTSP, SRT, UDT, HLS, MPEG2TS, Icecast and SHOUTcast.

The workflow is easy to adopt within any business logic:

1. Nimble Streamer media server processes incoming streams to get the content.
2. Nimble Advertizer calls your handler web application to get business logic description.
3. Advertizer gets files with advertisements to process them via Nimble Streamer according to your logic defined via handler.
4. Nimble inserts the ads into original media and packages it into output protocol
5. End user connects to Nimble and gets the stream containing original content mixed with advertisements.
6. Playback is running smooth regardless of ads insertion over time in any player which supports the output protocol.

Live input codec for live stream for ads insertion needs to be H.264. Notice that with our Live Transcoder you may also use other live codecs. For your ads source files you need to use H.264 codec, the container needs to be the MP4 file.

You can read full technical spec here.

Nimble Advertizer Server-side Ads Insertion framework is a premium functionality which requires additional payments. Please check this page to get more details about functionality and pricing.

Take a look at this tutorial showing an easy way to insert pre-rolls into live streams:

Related documentation

Nimble Advertizer, Nimble Streamer, Live streaming features in Nimble Streamer, Live Transcoder,

Vote for Softvelum in 2018 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards

The voting for Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards of 2018 is closed.

Follow up with Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards 2018 vote to help us win!

Softvelum 2018 Q2 news

In Softvelum, we are continuously improving our products and services to protect customers' data, so we've made several major updates in Q2 of 2018.

Before reading further, check the State of Streaming Protocols for Q2 2018, we've added total view time for all of customers, and it's 18 million hours watched through our server software every day!

GDPR

On May 25th, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of European Union came into effect adding new requirements for companies who may work with data of users from EU.
We have improved our products to comply with new regulation, as well as updated Privacy Policy accordingly. Please read it and let us know if you have any concerns about it.

By logging into our services you agree to our privacy policy and you give a consent to Softvelum to use your email for sending products updates like this one.

We don't send you emails very often, but from time to time we'd like to share news about our products with you.
If you'd like to avoid announcement emails, you can go to Users management page in your WMSPanel account, click on editing user information and check "Exclude user email from WMSPanel announcements" checkbox.

If you have any concerns or issues regarding your privacy in our products, please feel free to contact us via our helpdesk.

Cookies

We've also added cookies usage banner for all users who use WMSPanel website - you might have noticed it entering your account lately. It can be easily dismissed for your convenience.

If you use WMSPanel as a white label and would like this banner to appear for your users, you need to enable it. In order to keep white label look independent from Softvelum, we removed links to Softvelum privacy policy to make it neutral. If you want to control the appearance of this banner, go to Settings menu > Branding tab. For each domain you may click on gear icon to open settings dialog. There you may click on "Show cookie policy notice" checkbox to allow cookies banner for your white label users. It will have a company-neutral text, however if you'd like that banner to point to your own privacy policy, use "Privacy Policy URL" field to specify URL which will be used in banner text.

Nimble Streamer

Nimble Advertizer now supports audio-only HLS output. This means you can serve audio ads via Icecast and audio-only HLS.
You can check more about technical details on this page.

Speaking of HLS, Nimble Streamer now 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.

We follow up with latest updates of operating systems and create new packages for Nimble Streamer for supported platforms. Check out new packages of Nimble Streamer for Ubuntu 18.04 and Raspbian 9.

Live Transcoder

We've made a major improvement for transcoder which now allows using shared contexts. This enhances resources usage and simplifies the fine tuning. Read this article for more details on shared contexts.

Also, take a look at Troubleshooting Live Transcoder article for various cases you may face while using Live Transcoder.

We've also added NVidia decoder deinterlacing mode, you can read more about it here.

You may also find useful a step-by-step description for wildcard ABR scenario setup.

Mobile SDKs

Larix mobile SDKs were updated to include new improvements as well as mobile playback solutions. It has a number of bugfixes and performance improvements.

You can check SDKs release notes for all updates and use this page to subscribe for SDKs.

Stay tuned for more updates and follow us at Facebook and Twitter to get latest news and updates of our products and services.

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q2

Softvelum team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. It's based on stats from WMSPanel reporting service which handles data from Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer servers - there were 3600+ servers on average this quarter. WMSPanel collected data about more than 13 billion views.

We've added a new metric - total view time for our server products. It's nearly 1.7 billion this quarter, or 18+ million view hours per day.

Let's take a look at the chart and numbers of this quarter:

You can see HLS share as 67% and RTMP at 17% while progressive download went down a bit.

You can compare that to the picture of Q1 streaming protocols landscape:

fMP4 ABR HLS for VOD AVC and HEVC streaming in Nimble Streamer

Last year Apple announced their support for fragmented MP4, or fMP4, in HTTP Live Streaming protocol. This enables HLS carry the content without traditional MPEG-2 Transport Stream container, which allows reducing the traffic by removing MPEGTS overhead.
The traffic saving is more than 10%, with 15%-20% on average. The all-favorite Big Buck Bunny showed 13% saving on using fMP4 compared to MPEGTS.

Nimble Streamer already had fMP4 support for live streaming, now we introduce fragmented MP4 support for VOD HLS.

This container supports H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC video, with AAC, MP3 and AC-3 audio.

Setup

The setup for Nimble Streamer VOD streaming routes is made the same way as before, you can read this article for all details. The only difference is in the playback URL. Instead of "playlist.m3u8" name you will use "playlist_fmp4.m3u8" like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/sample.mp4/playlist_fmp4.m3u8

When accessing the stream using that type of URL, the content will be automatically re-packaged on-the-fly to provide it in fMP4 container and the playlist will be made using proper standard.

The same applies to ABR streaming with SMIL files. You can set up ABR VOD HLS using SMIL and then use "playlist_fmp4.m3u8" file name like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/abr.smil/playlist_fmp4.m3u8

This URL will also generate proper playlist and chunklists.

Playlists

The fMP4-based playlist generated by Nimble Streamer will look as follows.

H.264/AVC playlist for fMP4:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:6
#EXT-X-INDEPENDENT-SEGMENTS
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio",NAME="English",AUTOSELECT=YES,URI="audio.m3u8?nimblesessionid=3"
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1016419,CODECS="avc1.66.30,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=424x240,AUDIO="audio"
video.m3u8?nimblesessionid=3

H.265/HEVC playlist for fMP4:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:6
#EXT-X-INDEPENDENT-SEGMENTS
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio",NAME="English",AUTOSELECT=YES,URI="audio.m3u8?nimblesessionid=4"
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1284765,CODECS="hvc1.1.6.L93.80,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=1280x720,AUDIO="audio"
video.m3u8?nimblesessionid=4

The chunks list will be made the same way.


All Nimble HLS fMP4 streams can be played in latest versions of Apple's operating systems as well as in ffplay and JWPlayer. If you know of any other players or platforms, please share your comment about it.

Troubleshooting

Nimble Streamer internal transmuxer buffer sometimes may not be enough to fit generated HLS chunk. This may lead to this error in Nimble Streamer logs:

[tmux1] E: buffer is too small to generate

By default the buffer is 40MB. You can increase it using "vod_transmuxing_buffer". Read Nimble Streamer configuration description for config setup details.

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

Related documentation

fMP4 ABR HLS for live streaming, DVR for fMP4 ABR HLS in Nimble Streamer, Nimble Streamer, VOD streaming in Nimble Streamer, ABR VOD HLS using SMIL, MP3 and AAC to HLS transmuxing.

Live Transcoder wildcard scenarios

Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer is a powerful tool for easy transformation of your live content. One of its most popular cases is creating multiple renditions from single input which is used for ABR live streaming setup like real-time SLDP ABR streaming.

To process multiple streams, you typically need to specify a new scenario for every transcoded stream, this means you need to have a set of decoders, filters and encoders for each.
Even though Live Transcoder has a very convenient and easy-to-use drag-n-drop UI, this may be annoying for setting up big amount of streams.

This is why we have wildcard capabilities in transcoding scenarios:

1. You may specify just application name as a baseline for separating different types of scenarios.
2. For each incoming stream in this application, its stream name will be taken as is and it will be used for output stream names.

Wildcard scenario setup

Let's take a look at a simple scenario where we have origin application which will have multiple streams. We'll make a scenario to downscale the resolution and have audio channel being passed through. Here's we have an empty new scenario.

Add new decoder - it will have applicaiton name, with stream name left blank.

Then we'll create an encoder with application called live. Instead of a stream name we'll put {STREAM} placeholder.

Then we'll add a scaling filter and also set up audio passthrough. That passthrough will have same settings for origin and result stream.

So now if you publish /origin/camera1 stream, it will be transcoded to a lower resolution, with output stream name as /live/camera1.

Wildcard wizard

This approach is used in one of the Transcoder wizards which is created to simplify the process of creating new scenarios. Being in transcoder scenarios main page, click on Transcoding wizard button and then select Adaptive bitrate streaming.

You'll be able to enter incoming Application name and then leave Stream name blank. Clicking next, you'll see a page which proposes to specify names and select respective renditions for downscaled streams.

You can also change the output stream name and then finish the editing. You'll get the following result scenario.

Using a wildcard approach you may create a flexible scenarios perfectly fit for your use cases.


If you have any questions regarding any functionality, just let us know.

Related documentation

Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer, Nimble Transcoder YouTube playlist, Live Streaming features, ABR live streaming setup, Adding multiple audio tracks for ABR HLS

Softvelum 2018 Q1 news

First quarter of 2018 gave us several great features and updates.

Before reading further, check the State of Streaming Protocols for Q1 2018 - HLS is on the rise again, SLDP gains momentum, take a look.

Nimble Advertizer

Softvelum released a new premium functionality for Nimble Streamer called Nimble Advertizer. It's a server-side ads insertion framework based on Nimble Streamer.
It allows:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection
• Flexible timing for mid-roll ads
• Per-stream ads insertion
• Personalized ads
• Customizable business logic

Those capabilities are supported for RTMP, SLDP and Icecast output protocols, having all other supported protocols for input.

Take a look at Advertizer website for read more details and download technical spec.

Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer brought some attention within the industry.

How to Create a Live HLS Feed With HEVC: a new highly detailed article by Jan Ozer explaining how to make fMP4 live streams with Nimble Streamer.

We've also released a blog post describing HEVC transcoding Amazon EC2 instances - which instance types will work best for you for that kind of transcoding.

Take a look at Reliable Low Latency Delivery with SRT+SLDP - an article in Haivision blog describing a combination of SRT and SLDP protocols for building reliable delivery networks.

Softvelum has also partnered with Haivision to provide a 10% discount for their SRT-enabled encoders, check this blog post for details.

We get questions regarding Nimble Streamer usage in high load use cases and scenarios.

Take a look at performance tuning guide for live streaming via Nimble Streamer.

For those who extensively uses SSL for their streaming use cases, check our support for multiple certificates and domains.

Mobile SDKs

Larix mobile SDK is being updated all the time to include new features and improvements.

Our streaming library now supports publishing via SRT in Push mode for both Android and iOS. This allows improving the publishing process within unreliable networks. Read more about SRT and its usage in Nimble Steamer and feel free to try SRT in action using Larix Broadcaster free app.

Mobile playback solutions now support Icecast playback widely used for online radios.

We've also improved our web player to handle fallback for iOS browsers by opening stremainf in SLDP player.

You may also check SDKs release notes for all latest updates and use this page to subscribe for SDKs and their support.

That's it. Stay tuned for more updates and follow us at Facebook and Twitter to get latest news and updates of our products and services.

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q1

Softvelum team continues analyzing the state of streaming protocols. It's based on stats from WMSPanel reporting service which handles data from Wowza Streaming Engine and Nimble Streamer servers - there were 3600+ servers on average this quarter. WMSPanel collected data about more than 12 billion views.

Let's take a look at the chart and numbers of this quarter:

The State of Streaming Protocols - 2018 Q1

You can see significant increase of HLS to 65% share while other top competitors went lower.

Another interesting fact is the increase of SLDP - Q1 had more views than the year of 2017 combined.

You can compare that to the picture of 2017 protocols landscape:

Fallback for SLDP old iPhone browsers playback

As you know, SLDP low latency protocol is currently supported in MSE-enabled and MMS-powered web browsers for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and latest iOS, using our freeware web SLDP Player.

Old iPhones browsers running iOS versions before iOS17 don't support neither MSE nor MMS so if a viewer opens SLDP web player, it will not be able to play. However, we have Larix Player for iOS which supports full capabilities of SLDP protocol and also allows playing RTMP and Icecast.

Current SLDP HTML5 web player supports fallback capability which allows easily map web and iOS player. You can use default fallback scenario or you can set up custom fallback.

Default fallback

So if the browser is opened on iOS, it works like this:

1. Viewer opens page with SLDP web player.
2. When user clicks to play the stream, the browser asks the user to open it in Larix Player free app.
3. If the application is installed and viewer selects to play, then Larix Player app is opened and the playback starts.
4. Besides asking for opening the app, a viewer will see a link to download the app in AppStore - it will remain on the player. So if the app is not installed, a viewer will see the download link instead of playback.

Custom fallback

If you decided to use our player mobile SDK to build your own custom app, you may set your web player to open it instead of default SLDP Player.

We've added a few parameters to set this behavior in addition to available parameters described on web SLDP player page.

• ios_failback_app_url - SLDP iOS fallback application URL. By default it's SLDP Player but you may specify any URL for AppStore app.
• ios_failback_scheme - fallback scheme for non-secure connection (ws://). By default, it's 'sldp'. So if your web player has URL like ws://server.address/app/stream , it will be opened in your SLDP app like sldp://server.address/app/stream
• ios_failback_secure_scheme - fallback scheme for secure connection (wss://), by default, it's 'sldps'. It works the same way as iso_failback_scheme parameter.

Having those parameters you may customize fallback behavior.

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

Related documentation

SLDP , Synchronized playback on iOS with SLDP, Playback solutions, SLDP setup in Nimble Streamer, Server-side ads insertion for SLDP,

Nimble Advertizer inserts video ads into RTMP and SLDP

Softvelum introduces Nimble Advertizer, the Server-Side Ads Insertion (SSAI) framework for Nimble Streamer. This framework allows dynamically insert personalized ads into live streaming content.

Advertizer key features are:

• Pre-roll ads per each connection
• Flexible timing setup for mid-roll ads
• Per-stream ads insertion business logic
• Personalized ads

We're glad to announce that we've added support for RTMP and SLDP output protocols in addition to previously added Icecast.

Nimble Advertizer may use all input live protocols supported by Nimble Streamer, they are Icecast and SHOUTcast, RTMP, RTSP, SRT, HLS and MPEG2TS.

Live input codec for live stream for ads insertion needs to be H.264. Notice that with our Live Transcoder you may also use other live codecs.

For your ads source files you need to use H.264 codec, the container needs to be the MP4 file.

As mentioned previously, output live stream protocols are RTMP and SLDP - both protocols are used for live low latency live streaming.

The workflow is easy to adopt within any business logic:

1. Nimble Streamer media server processes incoming streams to get audio content
2. Nimble Advertizer calls your handler web application to get business logic description
3. Advertizer gets files with advertisements to process them via Nimble Streamer according to your logic defined via handler
4. Nimble inserts the ads into original media and packages it into Icecast protocol
5. End user connects to Nimble and gets audio stream containing original content mixed with advertisements
6. Playback is running smooth regardless of ads insertion over time in any player which supports Icecast.

You can read full technical spec here.

Server-side Ads Insertion framework (Nimble Advertizer) is a premium functionality which requires additional payments. Please check this page to get more details about functionality and pricing.

Take a look at this tutorial showing an easy way to insert pre-rolls into live streams:

Related documentation

Ads insertion for HLS video, Nimble Streamer, Live streaming features in Nimble Streamer, Live Transcoder,

NVENC shared context usage

Our Live Transcoder has full support for NVidia GPU decoding and encoding. As you could see from our stress-test article and EC2 tests, Nimble works very good with NVENC.

Usually customers perform decoding and encoding of a relatively small number of streams for input and output and it doesn't affect the performance of neither GPU, nor CPU. However there are cases when our customers use full power of hardware acceleration to process dozens of streams. In this case, some additional performance tuning should be done.

Nimble Live Transcoder allows re-using shared context to optimize resource usage. You may enable it by adding nvenc_context_share_enable parameter into Nimble Streamer config (nimble.conf).

nvenc_context_share_enable = true
nvenc_context_share_lock_enable = true

The second parameter above, nvenc_context_share_lock_enable, will prevent the errors related to NVENC decoding.

Nimble config control is described in this article.

Adding those parameter will enable NVENC context share which will increase the performance of Live Transcoder on high load and reduce number of NVENC-related issue.

If you'd like to manually create context cache, you may follow this article.

You may also find useful our Nimble Streamer performance tuning guide as well as Transcoder troubleshooting tips.

Feel free to visit Live Transcoder webpage for other transcoding features description and contact us if you have any question.

Zabbix monitoring of Nimble Streamer allows tracking server status, SRT streams and NVidia GPU status.

Contact us if you have any other questions or issues with Live Transcoder.

Related documentation

Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer, NVidia GPU support, HEVC support in Nimble Streamer, Live Streaming features, Using Amazon EC2 for HEVC transcoding, Nimble Streamer performance tuning.