Tutorial

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RTMP

RTMP is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe (Macromedia) for use in flash player. Until 2009 it had no public specification. A number of third-party RTMP-related products started in that period were based on the results of reverse engineering. In 2009 RTMP specification has been published which made developing such applications easier. However the spec is not full and misses significant issues concerning streaming H264.

System requirements

The module has been tested on Linux x86-family platforms. However it should work on FreeBSD too.

Licence

The module is distributed under BSD license.

Building NGINX with the module

Building is pretty obvious. Just cd to nginx source directory and configure nginx this way:

$ ./configure --add-module=/path/to/nginx-rtmp-module

Then make and make install.

Configuration

Simple live application

Simple live application configuration:

application live {

    live on;

}

You can add access list control:

application live {

    live on;

    allow publish 127.0.0.1;
    deny publish all;
    allow play all;

}

And you can add record support for live streams:

application live {

    live on;

    allow publish 127.0.0.1;
    deny publish all;
    allow play all;

    record all;
    record_path /path/to/record/dir;
    record_max_size 100M;
    record_unique off;

}

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming)

Choosing flash player

To watch RTMP stream in browser one should either develop flash application for that or use one of available flash players. The most popular players which are proved to have no problems with the module are:

• JWPlayer
• FlowPlayer
• Strobe Media Playback
• Clappr

Old versions of JWPlayer (<=4.4) supported capturing video from webcam. You can find that version in test/ subdirectory. However audio is not captured by this version of player. Recent free versions of JWPlayer have no capture capability at all.

Transcoding streams

You can use exec directive and ffmpeg for transcoding streams. For example:

application big {  
    live on;  
    exec /usr/bin/ffmpeg -re -i rtmp://localhost:1935/$app/$name -vcodec flv -acodec copy -s 32x32 -f flv rtmp://localhost:1935/small/${name};  
}  
application small {  
    live on;  
}

Video on demand

Distributed streaming

Notifications & access control

Statistics

Verifying session

Utilizing multi-core CPUs