[LAD] Floss alternative to red5

[Reuben Martin]

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:16:20 AM APO33 wrote:
> Hi Jonathan, Jeremy, Patrick,
> We are testing a lot webRTC of course! it's seems one of the main
> amazing AV web developpement because of html5 being such easy and
> great, should we say futur standard or is it already one?
> Also do you think html5 and the work of access local and display could
> be implemented without webRTC with getUserMedia(, createObjectURL? and
> for example only use the audio... I am watching the conference at the
> moment, mayeb she have the answer?!!
> I am wondering if we could also combined gstreamer+html5 (or other
> audio good floss software) on a server...
> So for you webRTC is THE solution for AV web based project alternative
> to red5 and flash? Is anyone have tested anything using python or java?
> 

WebRTC is designed for browser-to-browser communication. It's not designed for 
the one-to-many streaming paradigm like RTMP is. 

That said, the spec for RTMP is an open spec, and there are FOSS solutions for 
it. It's only the client side flash player the is proprietary, and even then 
99+% of people with browsers (excluding mobile) have flash installed. You might 
look into the RTMP module that can be built into NGINX to used it as an RTMP / 
HLS server.

https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

It works well in conjunction with ffmpeg encoding the live source feed.

The problem with native HTML5 is that it works great for canned VOD content, 
but offers no solution for live streaming content.

There is a new standard being finalized called MPEG-Dash that will allow native 
live streaming over HTML5. It also has a sister project MSE (Media Source 
Extension) which will provide the javascript API to control it on the client.

Currently it is available in the latest versions of Chrome. Firefox has 
limited support if you enable it as a build option, but of course that is for 
the Web-M flavor of the spec rather the h264 like Chrome. And I don't think the 
MSE stuff has landed in Firefox yet. IE will no doubt offer it in the future 
since they are taking part in developing the MSE spec.

So keep you eye on this. It might be something that becomes ready to test in 
production environments in the next year.

You can test it with Chrome here:
http://dash-mse-test.appspot.com/

MPEG-Dash spec:
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=57623

MSE working draft:
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/media-source.html

GPAC has a working MPEG-Dash muxer for h264 content:
http://gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr/

libdash is availble for anyone looking to roll their own:
https://github.com/bitmovin/libdash

-Reuben