streaming – Blog of Kliment Andreev – A place so I won't forget things

General: How to stream/broadcast from your phone

Kliment Andreev — Sun, 03 May 2020 13:47:48 +0000

In this short article I’ll describe briefly how to stream/broadcast from your phone’s camera to the world. In order to do that, you’ll need the Larix Broadcaster app installed on your phone, you will need a server with a public IP and a Haivision Media Gateway installed and for the end users, they’ll need standard VLC Player install.
The Larix Broadcaster app and the VLC player are free, but Haivision Media Gateway is not. In addition, if you have your own server and want to install it as a VM, you’ll have to contact the vendor directly. I’ll use a much easier option and host it in AWS where it comes as a template from the AWS Marketplace.

Haivision Media Gateway in AWS

In AWS, launch a new instance from the AWS Marketplace and search for SRT. You’ll see several options(SRT Gateway vs. Media Gateway and BYOL as PAYG license). I’ll choose Pay-as-You-Go Media Gateway.

As you can see, the software is not that cheap and you pay as much as you used. So if you are not streaming, just shut down the instance. Another important thing is the size of the instance, how much horse power you need. Is it 2 CPUs, 4 CPUs, 8? Well, nobody knows your needs, but it also depends on what type of stream are you sending, is it going to be a low-res or 1080p, how many users will consume that stream, etc. I strongly suggest that you go over this document. It describes how to size your environment and it gives you practical guidance on how to configure the Media Gateway. It’ not a necessary read to continue with this post, but it’s strongly recommended once you have everything up and running.
OK, in my case I’ll go with a t3.medium instance which is 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM. Create the instance as you normally do, make sure you have a public IP and the ports that are recommended in the security group given are open (22, 80 and 443). Once the instance boots up log with the default username haiadmin and the password is your instance id which is i-0123something.

I won’t go into details what each option does and what each keyword means, I’ll just guide you through creating a route for you to be able to broadcast. So, from the screen that you see, click on the button to add a route.

These are my parameters. For the Route Name, enter a description and make sure the checkmark is checked for Start Route. Further down, enter a description for the Source Name, in my case it’s Larix Cam or whatever you want to put here. The Protocol is TS Over SRT and the port is 50000. The Mode is Listener and the rest are the defaults. As I said earlier, if you want a better throughput, read the SRT deployment guide doc that I’ve sent earlier. It will tell you how to tweak these parameters. So, this tells the Media Gateway to listen on port UDP 50000 for any incoming broadcast.
Now, click on the Destination button.

The Destination is where the broadcast will be distributed. So, you got the point now. A camera on your phone sends the video to our instance in AWS and this instance (Media Gateway) distributes the feed to numerous viewers. You can’t stream from your phone directly, because your phone’s bandwidth and horse power are minuscule, so you need a gateway.
Here is how the Destination looks like.

Name the destination however you like, make sure the Protocol is TS over SRT and the Port is 50001. The Media Gateway passes the signal from UDP 50000 (source) to UDP 50001 (destination). Can you use some other ports? Yes, you can as long as they are not the same and greater than 1024 and less than 65535. Change the Type to Listener and leave the rest of the parameters as-is. Again, read the SRT Deployment Guide. Click Add and once you go back, click Create to create the route.
SUPER IMPORTANT: Make sure you edit the security group for this instance and open the ports for the source and destination. In my case, you have to add UDP ports 50000 and 50001 to the rules of the security group.

Larix Broadcaster app

On your phone download this app from Google Play or App Store. Go to Settings (the gear icon), Connections and click on the (+) sign to add a connection.
Enter a name for your connection, and for the URL enter the public IP of your instance and the port of the listener, so it looks like srt://public_IP:port. Make sure you specify srt:// as prefix. The defaults are 640×480 with audio, but you can change that in the settings for the app. Now, that you have a connection, make sure it’s active by selecting it and after that just hit the Record button. If something is not right, you’ll see it right away on your camera. It will tell you that the app can’t connect to the server. And if everything is OK after about 8-10 seconds you’ll see a green dot next to your source in the Media Gateway.

VLC PLayer

There is really nothing much to say here. Go to this website, download and install VLC and from the menu click on Media | Open Network Stream. Enter the IP address of the AWS instance and specify the destination port like srt://public_IP:port. Make sure you specify the destination port, not the source port and the protocol should be srt.

Stream a video file (optional)

In case you want your source to be a video file instead of a camera stream, reconfigure the source or add another route with new source and destination of which the source is RTMP. Configure the source so it looks like this.

From another server send the video stream to the Media Gateway using this command (you need ffmpeg installed).

ffmpeg -re -i video-file.mp4 -c copy -f flv rtmp://media_gateway_ip/live/stream

In VLC, use the srt://media_gateway_ip:port to watch the stream.

FreeBSD: icecast & ices – stream your music on the Internet

Kliment Andreev — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 11:54:44 +0000

In this post I’ll describe how to install and configure a streaming radio station with two separate streams. This means, you can have two or multiple radio stations running on the same port. For this, you’ll need a FreeBSD 10 server and some Ogg Vorbis music files. MP3 is not supported with ices2 client (licensing issues), but it’s easy to overcome that.

Before going any further, this is what you need to know.

icecast is the streaming server
ices is the client that supplies the music files to icecast
you are the listener, not a client

Install icecast

icecast can be easily installed from the packages or the ports. There is no need for any configurations, so we’ll do the packages.

pkg install icecast2

icecast comes up with a startup script, so we have to enable it on boot. Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf.

icecast_enable="yes"

icecast also comes up with a sample config script, so let’s modify it. The configuration parameters are described in the official document and this post will highlight only the necessary changes that you have to make.

cd /usr/local/etc/
cp icecast.xml.sample icecast.xml

Change the location, the admin email, change the passwords for source-password, relay-password and admin-password under authentication. It’s a good practice to change the default admin user as well. In addition, change the log directory under logdir and uncomment the user and the group that will run icecast daemon.

This is how my icecast.xml looks like.


    
    NJ
    icemaster@iandreev.com

    
        10
        2
        5
        524288
        30
        15
        10
        
        1
        
        65535
    

    
        
        password1
        
        password2

        
        username
        password3
    

    

    
    

    
    localhost

    
    
        8000
        
        
    
    

    
    
    
    

    
    

    

    

    1

    
		
        /usr/local/share/icecast

        
        /var/log/icecast
        /usr/local/share/icecast/web
        /usr/local/share/icecast/admin
        

        
        
        
        
    

    
        access.log
        error.log
        
      	3 
      	10000 
        
        
    

    
        0
        
            nobody
            nogroup

Create the log directory and change the ownership.

mkdir /var/log/icecast
chown -R nobody:nogroup /var/log/icecast

Start the icecast and check the log file.

service icecast2 start
tail /var/log/icecast/error.log

If everything is OK you’ll see something like this.

[2014-09-13  23:34:13] INFO main/main Icecast 2.4.0 server started
[2014-09-13  23:34:13] INFO connection/get_ssl_certificate No SSL capability on any configured ports
[2014-09-13  23:34:13] INFO yp/yp_update_thread YP update thread started

Go to http://yourserver.com:8000 and you should see this.

Then go to http://yourserver.com:8000/admin/stats.xml and you should see this.

Install ices

We’ll install ices from the packages and create a separate user and group called radio that will run the ices client. Ices client doesn’t come up with a startup script, so we’ll create one for each stream. In case you reboot, the streaming server and the clients will start automatically. We’ll also create a log directory.

pkg install ices
pw groupadd radio && pw useradd radio -g radio –m
mkdir /var/log/ices
chown –R radio:radio /var/log/ices

Switch to the radio user and create the folders for the configuration files and the two radio stations that you want to run. If you want more streams, just follow the pattern described bellow. In my case, I’ll have two radio stations, trance and liquid.

su - radio
mkdir conf liquid trance
cd ~radio/conf
cp /usr/local/share/ices/ices-playlist.xml liquid-playlist.xml

Let’s configure the first radio station and you’ll see how easy is to configure the the second one.

Edit the configuration file for the first stream (liquid-playlist.xml) and change the following values: background, logpath, logfile and pidfile.
Under stream section, change the name, genre and description.
Under the input section, change the param name=”file” parameter. This value should point to a file that contains each Ogg file in a separate line.
Under the instance section, change the password and the mount. The password supplied here must match the same source-password that was used to configure icecast (see line 31 in my example of icecast config). The mount parameter is how you are going to access the stream (e.g. http://yourserver.com:8000/station_name.ogg). Always end it up with .ogg.
I also change the nominal-bitrate to 128000, which means, ices will encode the streams as 128kbps streams.

Make sure you have enough bandwidth to support this. Use the following link to determine your needs.

Finally, here is my liquid-playlist.xml file.



    
    1
    
    /var/log/ices
    liquid.log
    
    4
    
    0

    
    /home/radio/liquid.pid

    
        
        
            Liquid radio
            Liquid D'n'B genre
            Commercial Free Liquid D'n'B radio stream
        

        

        
            playlist
            basic
            /home/radio/conf/liquid-playlist.txt
            
            0
            
            0
            
            0
        

		
        
            
            localhost
            8000
            password1
            /liquid.ogg

            
            2
            5 

            
            80

            
              
                128000 
                44100
                2

At this point, we need to put some Ogg files that we want to stream. In my case, I’ve put them under /home/radio/liquid for the first stream. Now, go to:

cd ~radio/conf
ls -d /home/radio/liquid/*.ogg > liquid-playlist.txt
cat liquid-playlist.txt

This will generate the playlist for you from all Ogg files. If you have your files separated in sub directories, then do:

cd ~radio/genre
find /home/radio/genre -name "*.ogg" -print > /home/radio/conf/genre-playlist.txt

At this point, start the station with ices liquid-playlist.xml. If everything is OK, you shouldn’t see anything. Ices will start in the background. Do a simple check:

ps -waux | grep ices
tail /var/log/ices/liquid.log

Check your radio with http://yourserver.com:8000/liquid.ogg. Now that you have the first radio ready, it’s very easy to configure the 2nd one. First, let’s create the configuration file as a copy from the first station.

cd ~radio/conf
cp liquid-playlist.xml trance-playlist.xml

I use vi to replace everything in trance-playlist.xml that says liquid as trance. Use :%s/liquid/trance/g.

Put some Ogg file for the 2nd station under ~radio/trance and create the playlist text file.

cd ~radio/conf
ls -d /home/radio/trance/*.ogg > trance-playlist.txt
cat trance-playlist.txt

Start the station with ices trance-playlist.xml and test it with http://yourserver.com:8000/trance.ogg.

Configure ices startup

Once you make sure that everything works fine, let’s create the ices startup files in case the server reboots.

Log as root and do:

cd /usr/local/etc/rc.d

Create the first startup script called ices_liquid and add everything from here.

#!/bin/sh
#
# PROVIDE: ices_liquid
# REQUIRE: DAEMON icecast2
# BEFORE:  LOGIN
# KEYWORD: shutdown

. /etc/rc.subr

name="ices_liquid"
rcvar=ices_liquid_enable

command="/usr/local/bin/ices"
extra_commands="reload"
pidfile="/home/radio/liquid.pid"
sig_reload="USR1"

load_rc_config "$name"
: ${ices_liquid_enable="NO"}
: ${ices_liquid_config="/home/radio/conf/liquid-playlist.xml"}
: ${ices_liquid_flags="${ices_liquid_config}"}
: ${ices_liquid_user="radio"}
required_files="${ices_liquid_config}"

run_rc_command "$1"

Save it and do chmod 555 ices_liquid to make sure it’s executable on start. Add ices_liquid_enable=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf. Follow the same pattern for the second startup script. Copy ices_liquid as ices_trance and replace every occurrence of liquid as trance. Then add ices_trance_enable=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf. Now you can control the streams with the standard FreeBSD daemon command service. E.g.

service ices_liquid start
service ices_liquid stop
service ices_liquid status

OK. At this point you have a streaming station(s) but they all run on port 8000. As we stated above, you can access a station by accessing this URL: http://genre.domain.com:8000/genre.ogg, speaking in general terms. Read further to see how can you bypass this restriction in order to access your radio behind a firewall.

Firewall

icecast runs on port 8000 and in many corporate environments only ports 80 and 443 are allowed inbound through various proxies. I tried to run icecast on port 80, but icecast refused to run. Mind that you can’t run icecast using a non-root account on port 80. Actually, you can. apache runs on port 80 as www user, but it’s parent process runs as root and then forks the processes. But most importantly, if you somehow make icecast to run as root, you can’t run apache on that port. The easiest way is to use mod_proxy. This module will do the heavy lifting for you. It will redirect port 8000 to port 80. This is how we are going to accomplish that using two virtual hosts in Apache.
First, create two DNS aliases, e.g. genre.domain.com and genrefw.domain.com. They should point to the same IP of your icecast server. In Apache, make sure you have mod_proxy and mod_proxy_html modules built in and loaded in httpd.conf. See my other post on how to run virtual hosts under Apache.

LoadModule proxy_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule cgi_module libexec/apache24/mod_cgi.so

or if you have the prefork/worker config file, you might also see this.


        LoadModule cgi_module libexec/apache24/mod_cgi.so

The virtual hosts directives in httpd-vhosts.conf should look like this.


    ServerAdmin admin@domain.com
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/genre.domain.com"
    ServerName genre.domain.com
    ErrorLog "/var/log/genre.domain.com-error_log"
    CustomLog "/var/log/genre.domain.com-access_log" common
    
        Options All
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
   
   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/usr/local/www/genre.domain.com/cgi-bin/"
   
        Options +ExecCGI
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
   


    ServerAdmin admin@domain.com
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/genrefw.domain.com"
    ServerName genrefw.domain.com
    ErrorLog "/var/log/genrefw.domain.com-error_log"
    CustomLog "/var/log/genrefw.domain.com-access_log" common
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPass / http://genre.domain.com:8000/genre.ogg
    ProxyPassReverse / http://genre.domain.com:8000/genre.ogg
    
        Options All
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted

Now, you have to create two virtual web sites, genre.domain.com and genrefw.domain.com. The genrefw.domain.com site will be an empty site. Read further and see how I built two web sites. You can make it much simpler or even more complex. I also enabled cgi-bin in order to run some scripts. The step below is optional. If you just want to bypass the firewall, create the two virtual hosts as described above and for regular users use http://genre.domain.com:8000/genre.ogg and for the users behind a firewall use http://genrefw.domain.com/genre.ogg.

Optional

I’ll create a web page that embeds the player and shows some info. There is a HTML5 menu and one of the options will tell you what track is currently playing. That’s why we needed cgi-bin. Here are my HTML and CSS files. Make sure you have 10 background images in the same directory, from background0.jpg to background9.jpg. They will rotate every 90 seconds. It looks cool! :) First, let’s create the cgi-bin folder under the virtual host destination.

cd /usr/local/www/genre.domain.com
mkdir cgi-bin

Then create a file called info.cgi that contains the following:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo ""

echo ''
echo ''
echo ''
echo 'Currently Playing '
echo ''
echo ''
grep "INFO playlist" /var/log/ices/genre.log | tail -n 1 | sed 's/ INFO playlist-builtin\/playlist_read//' | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/\/home\/radio\/genre\///'
echo ''
echo ''
exit 0

Then change permissions.

chmod 755 info.cgi

What this script does? It creates a simple HTML file from the output of the grep command. It just looks for the last appearance of the current playing track in the ices log.

Here is the HTML file.


    
        Genre Radio
            
	    
    



 
 

    INFO
    
        Radio
        
            Classical
            Other Genre
        
    
    About
    Contact

    
        
             
             Your browser does not support the audio element.
        
No sound? Click here!
Commercial Free Genre Radio: Kliment Andreev 2015 (c)

And the CSS file.

*{
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

body#bg0 {
  background: url('background0.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg1 {
  background: url('background1.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg2 {
  background: url('background2.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg3 {
  background: url('background.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg4 {
  background: url('background4.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg5 {
  background: url('background5.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg6 {
  background: url('background6.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg7 {
  background: url('background7.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg8 {
  background: url('background8.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}
body#bg9 {
  background: url('background9.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;
}

a, a:visited {
        outline:none;
        color:#1c4f64;
}

a:hover{
        text-decoration:none;
}

section, footer, header{
        display: block;
}


footer{
        background-color: #111111;
        bottom: 0;
        box-shadow: 0 -1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
        height: 45px;
        left: 0;
        position: fixed;
        width: 100%;
        z-index: 100000;
}

footer h2{
        color: #EEEEEE;
        font-size: 14px;
        font-weight: normal;
        left: 50%;
        margin-left: -400px;
        padding: 13px 0 0;
        position: absolute;
        width: 540px;
}
footer h2 i{
        font-style:normal;
        color:#888;
}

footer a.tzine,a.tzine:visited{
        color: #999999;
        font-size: 12px;
        left: 50%;
        margin: 16px 0 0 110px;
        position: absolute;
        text-decoration: none;
        top: 0;
}

footer a.tzine1,a.tzine1:visited{
        color: #999999;
        font-size: 12px;
        left: -5%;
        margin: 16px 0 0 110px;
        position: absolute;
        text-decoration: none;
        top: 0;
}

footer a i{
        color:#ccc;
        font-style: normal;
}

footer a i b{
        color:#c92020;
        font-weight: normal;
}


body{
        /* Workaround for some mobile browsers */
  background: url('background9.jpg') no-repeat 50% 50% fixed;
  background-size: cover;
  -moz-background-size: cover;
  -o-background-size: cover;
  -webkit-background-size: cover;

        font:14px/1.3 'Segoe UI',Arial, sans-serif;
}

/* Main */
/* Original width e 100% a ne 30%"*/
#menu {
    width: 30%;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 10px 0 0 0;
    list-style: none;  
    background-color: #111;
    background-image: linear-gradient(#444, #111);
    border-radius: 50px;
    box-shadow: 0 2px 1px #9c9c9c;
}

#menu li {
    float: left;
    padding: 0 0 10px 0;
    position: relative;
}

#menu a {
    float: left;
    height: 25px;
    padding: 0 25px;
    color: #999;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    font: bold 12px/25px Arial, Helvetica;
    text-decoration: none;
    text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #000;
}

#menu li:hover > a {
    color: #fafafa;
}

*html #menu li a:hover { /* IE6 */
    color: #fafafa;
}

#menu li:hover > ul {
    display: block;
}

/* Sub-menu */
#menu ul {
    list-style: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;    
    display: none;
    position: absolute;
    top: 35px;
    left: 0;
    z-index: 99999;    
    background-color: #444;   
    background-image: linear-gradient(#444, #111);    
    -moz-border-radius: 5px;
    border-radius: 5px;
}

#menu ul li {
    float: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    display: block;  
    box-shadow: 0 1px 0 #111111, 
                0 2px 0 #777777;
}

#menu ul li:last-child { 
    box-shadow: none;    
}

#menu ul a {    
    padding: 10px;
    height: auto;
    line-height: 1;
    display: block;
    white-space: nowrap;
    float: none;
    text-transform: none;
}

*html #menu ul a { /* IE6 */   
    height: 10px;
    width: 150px;
}

*:first-child+html #menu ul a { /* IE7 */    
    height: 10px;
    width: 150px;
}

#menu ul a:hover {
    background-color: #0186ba;
    background-image: linear-gradient(#04acec, #0186ba);
}

#menu ul li:first-child a {
    border-radius: 5px 5px 0 0;
}

#menu ul li:first-child a:after {
    content: '';
    position: absolute;
    left: 30px;
    top: -8px;
    width: 0;
    height: 0;
    border-left: 5px solid transparent;
    border-right: 5px solid transparent;
    border-bottom: 8px solid #444;
}

#menu ul li:first-child a:hover:after {
    border-bottom-color: #04acec; 
}

#menu ul li:last-child a {
    border-radius: 0 0 5px 5px;
}

/* Clear floated elements */
#menu:after {
    visibility: hidden;
    display: block;
    font-size: 0;
    content: " ";
    clear: both;
    height: 0;
}

* html #menu             { zoom: 1; } /* IE6 */
*:first-child+html #menu { zoom: 1; } /* IE7 */

Convert mp3 to ogg

You can use the sox utility that comes in the ports.

pkg install sox

Check the man page for detailed syntax, but I use simple conversion.

sox filename.mp3 filename.ogg

You can check the properties of any audio file with:

soxi filename

For batch conversion, create this script called mp32ogg.sh and execute it against all files in the folder. It will convert all mp3 files to ogg. Add sox parameters if needed.

#!/bin/sh
for i in *.mp3; do
        sox ./"$i" ./"${i%.mp3}.ogg"
done