VOD HLS in Nginx

Recently I have finished one project for Nginx Inc. The project is VOD HLS module making HLS stream from mp4 file. The module is fast and completely asynchronous. I think it is the fastest solution available. The module is easy to configure as well.

location / {
    hls;
    root /var/mp4;
}

Nginx VOD HLS module is proprietary. Please apply to Nginx Inc for more details.

VOD stat in 0.9.20

I’ve merged VOD statistics into master. Now you can see it on /stat page.

Optional HLS cleanup

Today I’ve added a new directive hls_cleanup toggling HLS fragment and playlist cleanup from nginx cache manager process. By default cleanup is on. Now you can turn it off and have plain MPEG-TS chunked recorder.

application myapp {
    live on;
    hls on;
    hls_path /tmp/hsls;
    hls_cleanup off;
}

Simple pull/push DNS load-balancing in 0.9.19

Simple DNS load-balancing is implemented in 0.9.19. When remote host name is resolved to multiple addresses then stream is pulled or pushed sequentially from all those addresses.

application myapp {
    live on;
    pull rtmp://video.example.com/someapp;
}

Suppose video.example is resolved to 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2. When the first server is unavailable the next connection attempt will be made to the second server.

Dynamic pull and push in 0.9.19

Since 0.9.19 version of nginx-rtmp-module you can dynamically pull or push streams with on_play and on_publish. 3xx HTTP result code used to redirect current stream. Now if the new stream name is started with rtmp:// then it’s supposed to be RTMP URL and relay (pull/push) is created for the current client.

http {
    ...
    location /local_redirect {
        rewrite ^.*$ newname? permanent;
    }
    location /remote_redirect {
        # no domain name here, only ip
        rewrite ^.*$ rtmp://192.168.1.123/someapp/somename? permanent;
    }
    ...
}

rtmp {
    ...
    application myapp1 {
        live on;
        # stream will be redirected to 'newname'
        on_play http://localhost:8080/local_redirect;
    }
    application myapp2 {
        live on;
        # stream will be pulled from remote location
        # requires nginx >= 1.3.10
        on_play http://localhost:8080/remote_redirect;
    }
    ...
}

In the example above myapp1 uses old redirect behavior, myapp2 shows the new feature.

In myapp2 application source stream name is not changed and pull is created for the source stream name. Later clients connecting to this stream will see the video pulled by the first client. That’s identical to usual pull behavior. You can change it however by specifying notify_relay_redirect on. This will redirect pulled stream to a new (long url-like) local name. So the streams will be grouped on rtmp url.

on_publish does the same for push operation.

The feature has 2 limitations

• RTMP URL should not contain domains names, only IP addresses
• nginx version>=1.3.10 is required

Time argument in on_update

New time argument has been added to on_update handler. It’s the number of second since play/publish call. With this you can limit client playback or publish time.