Introducing SLDP

Low latency has been a trending issue during past years as Flash and RTMP are being deprecated by the industry. So media streaming companies are trying different options to handle real-time video and audio delivery. Our company are getting requests about providing the solution which might address this concern.

We introduce SLDP: Softvelum Low Delay Protocol.

It's a last-mile delivery protocol to end-user devices at multiple platforms. SLDP is based on WebSockets.

It's basic capabilities are:

• Sub-second delay between origin and player.
• Codec-agnostic to play whatever your end-user platform has - H.264, VP9, HEVC.
• ABR support with switching channels taking just a GOP time and each channel may use its own codec.
• HTTP and HTTPS on top of TCP: use it with any network settings.

SLDP HTML5 playback is available in MSE and MMS browsers via light-weight JavaScript player. It works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Chromium and Microsoft Edge on the hardware platforms which have that support, like PC, Mac, iOS (iPad and iPhone), Android.

The mobile SDKs are available for iOS and Android.

As for server side, at the moment SLDP transmission is available Nimble Streamer. It's just another protocol output supported by our server. Any supported live protocols can be used as an input.

Feel free to try it in action right now by installing or upgrading your Nimble instance and selecting SLDP in live streams settings besides existing methods.

Please visit SLDP website and contact us in case of any questions as we're moving on with SLDP so your feedback is appreciated.

Related documentation

SLDP website, Nimble live streaming, Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer, Reliable Low Latency Delivery with SRT+SLDP

End-user access for WMSPanel API

WMSPanel has a set of APIs which allows requesting aggregated pre-processed data and take it into customer environment for further processing. Recent real-time and in-depth stats APIs give ability to request data on entire account level selecting data for all available servers and data slices.

Some of our customers need to provide access to their own clients so they could make their specific analysis. WMSPanel now allows that as well as account-wise API access. End user may now access data which is visible to his account according to data slice settings so his scope may be limited to some subset of stats. If a user is given access to several servers and slices, he may request specific slice and server.

This control has become part of users management feature set. To enable API for selected user, choose Control / Users management menu to see the list of users in your account.

Account's users management page.

Clicking on Edit link will bring a user details dialog. Click on API access check box to see API ID and API key. A user may use them for further requests.

User details with API access parameters.

You may re-generate API key in case of security concerns or just disable it any time.

Once the access is given, the user may go to Settings menu to API setup tab to see the API ID and generate the key for further usage. He may also control his own white list to access the API.

End-user settings for API access.

User will be able to send requests and get data according to his access level. You may give this access to some non-admin user as well as create separate admin user specifically for API requests.

Our team continues working on a Please also check full set of APIs. Let us know if you have any cases which need to be covered to build flexible streaming infrastructure.

Related documentation

Media servers reporting, WMSPanel API reference, Real-time stats API, In-depth stats API, WMSPanel users management, Daily stats push API, Pay-per-view framework, RTMP publish/unpublish notifications, Slices and branding in WMSPanel

WMSPanel real-time stats API

WMSPanel is often used as part of complex streaming infrastructure. This may require interaction between various system parts hence the need for application programming interface (API). Our team previously introduced a series of APIs like daily statistics push API, pay-per-view framework and RTMP publish/unpublish notifications. Now it's time to provide more statistics.

This article describes the real-time statistics API. It allows getting the data which is used for drawing real-time chart on a client dashboard for data slice and for a given stream.

Let's follow these steps to get the info.

1. Set up API on WMSPanel side

To start using the API, you need to make small setup on WMSPanel side.

First, the API should be enabled by WMSPanel team, so please contact us to enable it for your account. Then you need to follow these steps:

1. Go to Control menu -> API setup -> Pull API tab.
2. Copy Client ID for further usage in your scripts.
3. Click on "Generate New Key" to copy API key as well. This will be used for further authorization.
4. Populate white list with IPs of the hosts where you will be making API call from, like your development machine or your web server. Just enter new IP and click on "Add IP to Whitelist" one by one.

Check this screenshot as a reference:

Setting up pull API parameters.

Media server performance metrics update

We've recently updated servers list available under Servers menu. Previously there were columns for country, server name, IP addresses list, current state, WMSPanel software version and CPU+RAM statistics.

Now we also have a snapshot of connections count and bandwidth for each server. These numbers, as well as CPU and RAM metrics, are updated each 30 seconds so you can see each server performance snapshot in real-time mode.

The snapshot is available for both Nimble Streamer and Wowza Streaming Engine.

Take a look at the following screenshot.

Real-life example of servers list with Nimble Streamer edges and Wowza origin.

You can see:

• Nimble Streamer edges processing several dozens of viewers with 1% of its CPU capacity.
• Wowza origin, processing requests from edge servers as well as from end users.

So you may consider changing the configuration of your streaming infrastructure, like re-routing more viewers on Nimble edges.

If you think about any other useful info which might be useful in this server list, feel free to contact us and describe your vision.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, Nimble Streamer overview video, The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming, WMSPanel YouTube channel, Server tasks remote management via web UI

Monitoring Wowza CPU and RAM metrics

If you're administrating media streaming infrastructure, you probably monitor your system performance all the time. Having a high load environment requires proper set up and fine tuning so you need to keep an eye on what is happening to your memory or processor.

That's why WMSPanel team made a few new charts to show real-time and daily retrospective Wowza Media Server load. For each Wowza server presented in the panel, this includes CPU information and RAM metrics, both real-time and retrospective.