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Electaco

Streaming Video Setup

This explains setting up a HLS service, streaming video via it, and how to set that up in Electaco.

Please note that due to the technology involved, there is often a 10-20 second delay on the stream.

Table of contents
  1. Short overview
    1. Quickstart
      1. Tools
      2. Steps
  2. Details
    1. Video Source - RTMP
      1. FFmpeg
      2. OBS Studio
    2. Streaming Server
    3. Using stream with a video marker

Short overview

The video marker also support playing video from a HLS source. For this you need to link to the m3u8 playlist, and the type needs to be application/x-mpegURL.

The easiest way I found to set up a server was to use Docker with this image and using ffmpeg for streaming.

This OBS solution might also be an alternative.

Quickstart

Tools

You need these tools installed:

  1. Docker - a system for running pre-packaged services
  2. Python - A programming language runtime

Steps

When those two are installed, you can then:

  1. Download this zip file - it contains setup file for running the HLS service in docker, and a simple python script for streaming video files via ffmpeg

  2. Open up a commmand line in the directory you unpacked the files to

  3. Run the command docker-compose up -d to start downloading the service image and starting it up
    • The service defaults to two RTMP streams: “mystream” and “testing”
    • When running it has a web service at http://localhost:8080/ where you can open the streams
  4. To start a stream, run the command py stream.py <path-to-video-file> and shortly after the video should start playing on the web page listed above
    • Default target is “mystream”, you can change to the testing screen by adding ”–key testing” to the command

  5. In Electaco, set the video url to http://localhost/hls/mystream.m3u8 and the Type to application/x-mpegURL

  6. To make this available from other machines, you need to set up port forwarding and use external address in the marker url

Details

Video Source - RTMP

First of all you need a video source that’s capable of sending the video in RTMP format.

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is an all-in-one command line video tool that - among other things - support reencoding a video and sending it via RTMP.

FFmpeg have a lot of options for re-encoding and scaling video, and can do just about anything you’d want if you spend enough time tinkering with it, but for a quick start, you can do something like this:

ffmpeg -re -i <inputfilename> -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -g 30 -acodec aac -strict -2 -f flv rtmp://<streamtarget>

For more information about FFmpeg and using it, the FFmpeg Recepies page is a good start.

OBS Studio

OBS Studio is a tool for screencasting and streaming desktop / games. It supports RTMP protocol

To use it, set the Stream server service to custom, and put in the RTMP link in “Server” and key in “Stream key”.

Streaming Server

While RTMP is excellent for streaming to few targets, it’s less suited for many audiences and it’s not well supported by web tools

For Electaco to read the live stream, it has to be converted to HLS format.

The easiest way to get running is via Docker, a software for running pre-packaged services. With Docker installed, you only need to run this command to get a stream server running:

docker run -p 1935:1935 -p 8080:8080 jasonrivers/nginx-rtmp

This will start up a HLS streaming server at port 8080, and an RTMP service on 1935 (default RTMP port). It will have these two streams:

  • mystream:
    • RTMP: rtmp://localhost/live/mystream
    • Web: http://localhost:8080/hls/mystream.m3u8
  • testing:
    • RTMP: rtmp://localhost/live/testing
    • Web: http://localhost:8080/hls/testing.m3u8

For this to be accessible to others, you’ll need:

  1. Set up port forwarding to port 8080 on your machine
  2. Use external network address instead of “localhost” in the url set in markers

Setting this up varies with your network setup and hardware, and is outside of the scope of this guide

Using stream with a video marker

When the stream is set up and working, set the video url on the Video marker to http(s)://<network address>/hls/<stream key>.m3u8 and the Type to application/x-mpegURL

The video should start playing shortly