2019 Q3 summary

This quarter our team kept improving our existing products and rolling out new ones.

Before moving to certain updates, take a look at these useful articles which give broad view on our products' capabilities:

• Power edge: we've made new Softvelum products' snapshot which describes so call power edge use case which uses heavy-duty edge servers for transcoding and processing.
• ABR SLDP: as Flash and RTMP playback fades away, more customers use SLDP protocol for low-latency live streaming to their users. We've made ABR SLDP overview to show how you can use this capability.

Let's go to specific pieces, there's a lot to take a look at.

Qosifire updates and free check-up

We keep improving Qosifire live streaming quality monitoring service.

• Qosifire free 30-seconds checkup is now available to everyone without the need for sign up. You may run the check-up for HLS, RTMP and Icecast stream as if it's working in Qosifire.
• We've updated alerts system in Qosifire to allow controlling the recipients on per-stream level.
• Some streams show "Buffer too short" alerts, we've explained this in the following article.

Feel free to sign up and try Qosifire in action.

Larix Screencaster for iOS

We're glad to announce our new application - Larix Screencaster for iOS. It allows capturing the screen and audio of iOS device for further encoding and transmission, and has all streaming capabilities of Larix Broadcaster. Read this article to learn more about setting up iOS screencasting.
The source of iOS Larix Screencaster will be available in the nearest release of iOS Larix SDK. So if you're a subscribed SDK customer, you'll have it as soon as it's out.

We've also updated SLDP Player for Android to add HLS and MPEG-DASH playback via ExoPlayer for convenience of usage and media testing.

Also check latest information about our mobile solutions here.

Upgrades

We always recommend our customers to keep up with our software updates and upgrade Nimble Streamer accordingly.

With recent update of Live Transcoder, we require to make upgrading both Live Transcoder and Nimble Streamer at the same time. We use FFmpeg for decoding and filtering operations and we moved from FFmpeg 3 to FFmpeg 4, hence the correlated upgrade.
So if you have Live Transcoder and you plan upgrading your Nimble Streamer, please follow this upgrade instruction.

NVENC users has had some issues with upgrading NVidia drivers. So we made this detailed instruction which we recommend using during your upgrades.


SCTE-35, DVB and Icecast processing and pass-through

We've released a number of features for Nimble Streamer and Live Transcoder to cover cases when we get some data on top of media stream.

• SCTE-35 markers passthrough has been improved
• SCTE-35 markers can now be injected into live stream at any moment to trigger ads
• DVB subtitles processing has been added.
• Icecast metadata in RTMP can now be processed and also passed through Live Transcoder.
• Nimble API allows inserting Icecast metadata into RTMP real-time.

Other Nimble Streamer updates

There were a bunch of features and updates that will be important for many customers.

• We've reviewed Nimble Streamer parameters and put them into single page on our website for easier search and usage.
• Nimble Streamer session IP handling can now be controlled via config parameter.
• Republishing API has been added to native Nimble API.
• Constant bitrate and mux rate are explained for thos who use UDP streaming.
• Certbot usage with Nimble Streamer is described in details for further usage
• We've added new questions in our Paywall FAQ.
• Our DVR was improved by adding offset as described in this article.
• Last but not least: Nimble Streamer is now available in Debian 10.

Last but not least, take a look at The State of Streaming Protocols report for 2019 Q3 showing (no surprise) the domination of HLS.

We'll keep updating you with our new features and products, stay tuned.