3 posts tagged with "Tutorial"

What an operator wants to know at 3 a.m.

Many operators keep a player running and watch the broadcast to decide whether the service is healthy. That is necessary work, but a player shows only the one rendition currently selected out of the several quality levels generated for the same broadcast. All it tells you is that this one rendition looks fine over the network you happen to be using. It cannot tell you whether only the transcoding step that produces 360p on the server is falling behind, whether only viewers in another region are buffering, or whether a backlog inside the server is accumulating into seconds of latency for viewers. By the time something looks wrong in the player, viewer complaints have already come in.

While a broadcast is running, there are three things an operator actually wants to know.

1. Is the service healthy right now?
2. If it is not, what is wrong?
3. Is it an ingest problem (the direction from the encoder into the server), a server problem, or a problem for only some viewers?

Answering all three means seeing, in one place, the state of the input streams, the server's internal processing, and the traffic going out to viewers.

Making a live channel redundant comes down to one thing: keeping the output of the two Origins behind your CDN, Primary and Backup, synchronized so that the player can switch between them at any time and keep playing without interruption.

With VOD this is easy. The files are pre-rendered and static, so any Origin serves the exact same bytes, and putting Primary/Backup behind a CDN is all it takes. Live is different. Each Origin cuts the stream into segments in real time, so even when both receive the same broadcast, their output does not line up on its own.

This post covers what has to line up to make a live channel truly redundant, and in particular how to synchronize the encoder-origin path.

OvenMediaEngine is an open-source and sub-second latency streaming server capable of handling large-scale and high-definition streams. It can be installed and used in various environments, such as servers, CDNs, and Clouds. Today, we will show you how to easily use OvenMediaEngine by installing Docker on an AWS EC2 instance.