Sometime last year,
we worked on a client project to create a prototype for a server that is, in essence, a "transcoding proxy". It accepts
N HTTP client streams and makes them available for an arbitrary number of clients via HTTP GET (and/or over RTP/UDP) in the form of WebM streams. Basically, it's something similar to
Twitch.tv. The terms of our work with the client allowed us to make this work available as Free and Open Source Software, and this blog post is the announcement of its public availability.
Go and try it out!
git clone http://code.centricular.com/soup-transcoding-proxy/
The purpose of this release is to demonstrate some of the streaming/live transcoding capabilities of GStreamer and the capabilities of
LibSoup as an HTTP server library. Some details about the server follow, but there's
more documentation and
examples on how to use the server in the git repository.
In addition to using GStreamer, the server uses the GNOME HTTP library
LibSoup for implementing the HTTP server which accepts and makes available live HTTP streams. Stress-testing for up to 100 simultaneous clients has been done with the server, with a measured end-to-end stream latency of between 150ms to 250ms depending on the number of clients. This can be likely improved by using codecs with lower latency and so on—after all the project is just a prototype. :)
The
N client streams sent to the proxy via HTTP PUT/PUSH are transcoded to VP8/Vorbis WebM if needed, but are simply remuxed and passed through if they are in the same format. Optionally, the proxy can also broadcast each client stream to a list of pre-specified hosts via RTP/UDP.
Clients that want to stream video from the server can connect or disconnect at any time, and will get the current stream whenever they (re)connect. The server also accepts HTTP streams via both Chunked-Encoding and fixed-length HTTP PUT requests.
There is also a JSON-based REST API to interact with the server. There is also in-built validation via a
Token Server. A specified host (or address mask) can be whitelisted, which will allow it to add or remove
session id tokens along with details about the types of streams that the specified
session id is allowed to send to the server, and the types of streams that will be made available by the proxy. For more information, see the
REST API documentation.
We hope you find this example instructive in how to use LibSoup to implement an HTTP server and in using GStreamer for streaming and encoding purposes. Looking forward to hearing from you about it!
