GStreamer Streaming Server Library

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Introducing the GStreamer Streaming Server Library, or GSS for short.

This post was originally intended to be a release announcement, but I started to wander off to work on other projects before the release was 100% complete.  So perhaps this is a pre-announcement.  Or it’s merely an informational piece with the bonus that the source code repository is in a pretty stable and bug-free state at the moment.  I tagged it with “gss-0.5.0″.

What it is

GSS is a standalone HTTP server implemented as a library.  Its special focus is to serve live video streams to thousands of clients, mainly for use inside an HTML5 video tag.  It’s based on GStreamer, libsoup, and json-glib, and uses Bootstrap and BrowserID in the user interface.

GSS comes with a streaming server application that is essentially a small wrapper around the library.  This application is referred to as the Entropy Wave Streaming Server (ew-stream-server); the code that is now GSS was originally split out of this application.  The app can be found in the tools/ directory in the source tree.

Features

  • Streaming formats: WebM, Ogg, MPEG-TS.  (FLV support is waiting for a flvparse element in GStreamer.)
  • Streams in different formats/sizes/bitrates are bundled into a single “program”.
  • Streaming to Flash via HTTP.
  • Authentication using BrowserID.
  • Automatic conversion from properly formed MPEG-TS to HTTP Live Streaming.
  • Automatic conversion to RTP/RTSP (Experiemental, works for Ogg/Theora/Vorbis only.)
  • Stream upload via HTTP PUT (3 different varieties), Icecast, raw TCP socket.
  • Stream pull from another HTTP streaming server.
  • Content protection via automatic one-time URLs.
  • (Experimental) Video-on-Demand stream types.
  • Per-stream, per-program, and server metrics.
  • HTTP configuration interface and REST API is used to control the server, allowing standalone operation and easy integration with other web servers.

What’s not there?

  • Other types of authentication, LDAP or other authorization.
  • RTMP support.  (Maybe some day, but there are several good open-source Flash servers out there already.)
  • Support for upload using HTTP PUT with no 100-Continue header.  Several HTTP libraries do this.
  • Decent VOD support, with rate-controlled streaming, burst start, and seeking.

The details

 

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