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onevoisses's avatar
onevoisses
Visitor
14 years ago

HTTP Live Streaming (hls)

I have finished my first channel.Now I want to look at live streaming but it seems that there are only limited solutions to this namely:-
Sorenson Squeeze 7
Wowza Streaming Server (which uses Mac and Linux)

I am from the Linux,Unix and Mac platforms and believe in choice,a whole lot of it.
Can anyone suggest if there are any other Streaming or Encoding software out there for HLS?
or Give us a Lesson 1000 on this HTTP Live Streaming and its near best implementation for Roku?

13 Replies

  • Note that rtmp is a completely different protocol than HLS and is not supported by Roku. If you're getting rtmp output, then you have not properly configured it to output HLS.

    Also, m3u8 is not just for audio streams, it is the way all HLS streams are packaged. The HLS spec can be viewed at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos ... reaming-06.

    --Mark
  • Hmm...
    The more I read, the more confuse I get. Thing is I need to output to a couple of different servers / streams now. Maybe I should do the move and deal with a service bureau like Akamai (who contact me twice a week to offer their services). That way I could upstream to their server, and let them do the delivery to the places I need.
    ...And I could take advantage of their Seachange ad server, to insert the commercials on my channel. Doing it 'manually' right now. Working with that ad server would give me the option to use Google TV ads. Lots of things to consider, the annual subscription for my Flash server is coming in April.

    Joel, are you aware of some Roku broadcasters who send you streams via Akamai? It all works well?

    sv
  • If you are planning on streaming to more than just a few devices at a time then you probably will need something more robust than just one or two servers.

    As to confusion, m3u is a playlist type, m3u8 is a playlist type supporting utf-8 international characters. M3u8 files are most commonly used for broadcasting live streaming video to Iphone, Ipad and Roku devices, whereas m3u files are mostly used for streaming mp3 files.

    There are quite a few options for streaming, including Akamai and others, check the list here:

    viewtopic.php?f=34&t=34726

    I think there are many more options since that thread was first started, but many of those options use companies like Akamai, Limelight, Bitgravity and Level3 anyway, but they provide a front end to make things easier for some people than going directly through those CDN's.

    - Joel