Streamer

What is this?

This is a docker image which provides live video stream receiving and broadcasting with an optional, fully customisable authentication pugin system via RTMP and HLS. Each stream is also automatically recorded and converted to an MP4 to allow for re-broadcasting and re-distribution.

Purpose

I've been investigating video streaming for a while, and the UKFast Hackathon 2020 seemed like a perfect opportunity to share this with people.

With educational institutions around the world shutting their doors and moving to distance learning due to COVID-19, streaming video is rapidly growing in demand. Not every institution has the budget to pay for a video streaming service, so a lot of them are turning to open source for a more cost-effiecient solution.

Equally, I've been asked by different people about how they could host their own webinars and similar events, this will provide them with the ability to do so.

How It Works

This docker image lsitens on port 1935 on /live/{streamName} for imcoming RTMP requests and exposes port 8080 on /hls to expose the streams.

Prerequisites

• Docker

Usage

Basic Usage

Pull the image:

docker pull phily245/streamer

Basic mounting:

docker run --network host -p 1935:1935 -p 8080:80 -d --name streamz phily245/streamer

Volume Mounting

Docker containers are disposable and easily torn down. When this happens, as docker containers are virtual file systems they hold all of the stream data and recorded streams without mounting volumes your vidoes are stored in this volatile storage. It's higly recommended to map /home/videos to a file location outside of the docker image, e.g. to the host or to a kubernetes volume for example. The recommended way of doing this is using the -v flag:

docker run -v /path/to/storage:/home/videos phily245/streamer

Authentication

Authentication is turned off by default. To enable authetication, you need to provide a URL that can perform the authentication, this way we can keep this dockerfile language agnostic. there are two build variables we can set to configure this:

• RTMP_AUTH_URL: Authentication for users attempting to stream to your container via RTMP
• HTL_AUTH_URL: Authentication for users trying to consume streams from your container over HLS

This expects a HTTP status code of 200 in the response to pass validation and 401 to fail validation.

A quick and dirty example of how to achieve this in PHP using BASIC auth would look a little like this:

<?php
if (empty($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) === false || empty($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']) === false) {
    http_response_code(401);
    die;
}

if ($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] === 'foo' && $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] === 'bar') {
    http_response_code(200);
    die;
}

http_response_code(401);