readme.md

hls-media-server

Node server to transcode video files and stream on the fly via HLS.

*This is a work in progress & playground for HLS streaming. Not production ready!

Note: requires ffmpeg

What is the problem?

Streaming videos of any format on demand with seeking.

How to achieve this?

Using FFmpeg and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol.

Generate the full .m3u8 playlist immediately so the client behaves as if the entire video is ready to play. In order to make the playlist ahead of time we need to set a static segment length. When the client seeks to a portion of the video that has not been transcoded yet, we cancel the current job and start a new one.

How it Works

1. Receive request to start stream session (i.e. localhost:4000/stream/name-of-movie.mkv)
2. Get metadata from video file using FFprobe
3. Use file metadata & client limitations to determine how the video will be transcoded (or if)
4. Generate .m3u8 playlists
5. Start the FFmpeg job of remuxing video to HLS
6. Listen for .m3u8 and .ts requests from client player (HLS.js)

Terminal displays which chunks of the video have been created by Ffmpeg and which have been fetched by client already. Green arrow is the segment being tracked as the "currentSegment" for the purpose of detecting when a seek has occurred.

Usage

Clone this repo and create a media directory in root

Add some sample media files in there (preferably several minutes duration). Get samples here

npm run start

Go to localhost:4000 to view a list of files and open a stream session.

Note: All sessions are closed and HLS files are deleted on SIGINT.

To Do

Get client player/device/limitations on open stream request.

Selecting best encoding options based on file and client capabilities.

See about direct play if possible.

Master playlist needs correct variation strings.

Contributions

Would appreciate any help at all.

License

MIT