FFserver

This project aims to replace the hard to configure and maintain old FFserver component of the FFmpeg project.

Core goals include only using the public API of the FFmpeg-libraries to ease maintainability and use an easy to understand configuration file format.

Building

To build the project a Makefile is supplied. No additional configuration system is in place (yet).

Dependencies

To successfully build the project the development files of the following projects must be present:

• ffmpeg (libav*)
• lua
• libmicrohttpd

The versions building was tested on are:

• ffmpeg 4.0 or newer
• lua 5.3
• libmicrohttpd 0.9.51

After successfully building the project with make it can be used with a configuration file.

Configuration

A configuration file is a lua file that is evaluated and the resulting object is used to configure servers. A single instance can start multiple servers. An example configuration file containing only one server and one stream could look like this:

settings = {
    default_server = {
        bind_address = "0.0.0.0",
        port = 8080,
        default_stream = {
            input = "default.mkv",
            formats = { "mkv", "hls", "dash" }
        }
}

Note that multiple streams can be configured for a single server and multiple servers can be defined in a single configuration file.

A sample configuration configuring multiple streams and servers is present as sample_config.lua.

Accessing a stream

Accessing a stream is done with an HTTP client. To receive a stream, request the server name, the stream name and the format in an HTTP GET request. To receive the above stream as matroska the request would read:

GET /default_server/default_stream/mkv

or for HLS:

GET /default_server/default_stream/hls

Limitations/known issues

• Input files are not validated for muxability (mostly an issue for HLS and DASH)
• Client side "unclean" disconnect causes memory leak

Technical Details

More technical details about the implementation can be found in Technical.txt.