video-streamer-encoder

README

Video-Streamer-Encoder

Stream videos using HTTP/1.1 chunked Transfer Encoding while simultaneously encoding and saving to disk for future video plays.

Background

I have a huge collection of HD home videos that I wish to share with family and friends. A wide variety of (low-end and high-end of different form-factors) devices will be used to access these and I didn't want to waste bandwidth streaming the full resolution. At the same time, I didn't want to spend days transcoding the videos when only a few select videos may be viewed. So I wanted something dynamic and came up with this solution.

Uses

• Golang is the programming language used to build the server
• FFmpeg for video streaming and encoding

Install

Build the binary to run the server:

$ cd git clone https://github.com/theju/video-streamer-encoder.git
$ cd video-streamer-encoder
$ go build server.go

Configuration

The configuration file looks like this:

{
    "Host": "localhost",
    "Port": 8000,
    "InputDir": "/path/to/directory/containing/videos",
    "OutputDir": "/path/where/encoded/files/are/stored",
    "Widths": [240, 480, 720, 1080]
}

All the attributes except Widths are self-explanatory. Widths takes an array of resolutions to which the videos are encoded.

Usage

Run the server

./server --config=/path/to/config.json

In your browser, access the URL of the video

http://localhost:8000/480p/video_filename.mp4

The above step assumes that video_filename.mp4 exists in the InputDir and will be encoded to 480p resolution and saved in a sub-directory 480 under the OutputDir.

TODO

• Make use of FFmpeg API
• Send the most optimal amount of data (currently 64K per chunk) based on connection speed
• Evaluate Http2 streaming

License

MIT License. Please refer the LICENSE file.