Create live test streams

This repository contains scripts and tools to create IPTV and DASH low latency streams.

Note if you run things locally you need to have ffmpeg >= 5 installed.

Requirements

This repo and the scripts in it are geared towards running on a Mac where we have access to hardware acceleration and can assume that some basic tools are available. Before you can start you need to make sure that the following tools are installed and available in PATH:

• ffmpeg -- brew install ffmpeg should do the trick

Components

The repo contains the following components and tools that are relevant for the setup:

• http-origin contains sources for an http origin server. This is required to stream a DASH ultra low latency stream with cmaf chunked transfer. The origin server can also be used for time syncing and makes sure that segments can be streamed while they are still being generated by the encoder.
• source-stream Contains a script that creates a test stream and pushes it as mpegts over multicast UDP to the specified target IP:PORT. This is the source stream for the dash packager and needs to be executed first. You can also run this standalone if you do not need the corresponding dash stream.
• dash-stream Contains a script that creates a dash low latency stream from a source-stream and pushes the results to the http-origin.

Very basic usage

Assuming the http origin server is compiled and ready to go (you need a golang SDK installed or used docker otherwise), you can get started with three shells running in parallel:

1. ./http-origin/bin/http-server Runs the origin server. This will be available on http://localhost:8080 by default
2. ./source-stream/source-stream.sh Runs the source stream generator. You should have an mpegts multicast stream available on udp://233.0.0.1:1234 now. You can use ./source-stream/play-stream.sh to check and confirm that.
3. ./dash-stream/dash-stream.sh Runs the dash transcode from the UDP stream on udp://233.0.0.1:1234 and pushes to the origin server. You should have a dash stream available now on http://localhost:8080/live-1/manifest.mpd and you can quickly verify this using ffplay http://localhost:8080/live-1/manifest.mpd.

Docker and Docker Compose setup

The repository contains a multi-layer docker file that can be used to create each of the components as a docker container.

There is also a docker compose setup in the root folder that you can run everything with one command. This will create a localhost deployment. Note though that you might need to pass the timeserver URL to the dash-stream if you plan to use the stream outside of localhost.

Note also that so far it seems that the UDP multicast is not leaving the docker containers. If you need to expose the multicast streams directly, do not use a docker setup but run the scripts directly on the host (except the origin server, that can still run in a container).

Time Server URL

The default time server URL is localhost and uses the origin server. If you need to access the stream from a remote device, make sure that you specify the local IP address that will expose the origin server when building the compose stack, i.e.:

$> docker-compose -f compose-ott-only.yml build --build-arg LOCAL_IP=192.168.242.106

The above will build the stack and will use http://192.168.242.106:8080/time as the time endpoint referenced in the manifest.

Run the stacks

There are two stacks contained in the repo

• compose-ott-only.yml will create two DASH live streams expose on port 8080 on the host. The manifests are:
  • http://localhost:8080/live-1/manifest.mpd
  • http://localhost:8080/live-2/manifest.mpd
• compose-iptv-ott.yml will create two DASH live streams expose on port 8080 on the host and in addition expose IPTV multicast streams. The manifest URLs are the same as above. Note that there are severe limitations with the multicast delivery and if you need to access the multicast output directly, you might want to consider just running the HTTP server and run the source and dash component scripts directly.