Online audio and video using free software and open standards

The web as we know it today couldn’t exist without free software. However, the web also helped re-emergence of proprietary technologies and incompatible, closed systems. One of the areas where this shows is in web multimedia - video and audio streaming, both live and on demand. Publishing a video or hosting a live stream today is trivial. Publishing a video or hosting a live stream using free technologies and avoiding artificial limits posted by the popular platforms is a quite different experience.

This talk highlights challenges in publishing video and audio content using only free and open source software and unencumbered technologies, examines choices you have to make and walks through several examples of how to publish multimedia on the web with minimal use of proprietary and closed solutions.

Transcript

1. Online Audio & Video using Free Software and Open Standards Senko Rašić <senko@senkorasic.com>
2. Online video is everywhere 9% 2% 14% 75% Video Web,Email,Data Gaming File sharing Source: Cisco VNI-2016-2021
3. Audio streaming is ubiquitous U.S. Music Industry Revenues 2017 15% 17% 3% 65% Streaming Synch Physical Downloads Source: RIAA 2017 Revenue Statistics
4. Producing video is trivial … … inside a walled garden
5. Open Standards & Free Software
6. Live & On Demand
10. Compatibility nightmare Source: MDN web docs
11. 99% solution — H.264+AAC Source: MDN web docs
12. Progressive freedom enhancement Source: MDN web docs
13. A new hope: AV1 open, royalty-free video codec with patent grants 30% improvement on VP9 and HEVC 70% improvement on H.264
14. Let’s stream!
15. Internet Radio with Free Software IceCast ffmpeg mpd vlc ezstream gstreamer … HTML5 audio vlc mplayer omxplayer … Codecs AAC MP3 Vorbis Opus SHOUT HTTP
16. Cheese VLC mencoder ffmpeg OBS Studio … nginx red5 ant media server … HTML5 video VLC GNOME/KDE media player mplayer gstreamer … Live Video Workflow with Free Software
17. Recording ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -f alsa -i hw:1,0 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 1800k -crf 31 -c:a libopus output.webm ffmpeg Cheese (GNOME)
18. Transcoding Handbrake ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 1800k -crf 31 -c:a libopus output.webm ffmpeg
19. Live Streaming OBS Studio ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -f alsa -i hw:1,0 -f flv rtmp://login:pass@example.com/app/stream ffmpeg (again!)
20. Streaming Server nginx-rtmp-module, Red5, Ant Media Server
21. Video Player VLC, Kodi, GNOME/KDE Media Player, mplayer, omxplayer, … <video src=“http://example.com/video.webm">
22. Bandwidth & Compute Requirements
23. LIVE H.264 + AAC in MPEG-TS over HLS (nginx) + JWPlayer
24. Thank you! Senko Rašić <senko@senkorasic.com>