Comments on: Loomiere/Stream – A high performance streaming server

By: ruthe

ruthe — Sun, 30 May 2010 19:09:26 +0000

+1 Laurie

We need some explanations please ^^

By: Laurie

Laurie — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:01:00 +0000

Thanks for the suggestions valeriup. I’ve managed to get the server script running under the xinetd setup. In the browser I can … http://localhost:600/ and get the contents of a video file. Before tidying anything up (script wise) next step is to get the video displayed in a player.

HISTORY:

For sometime I’ve been showng the family videos on my site using .flv files, encoded with flv, mp3 audio. xmoov.php to perform streaming and JW Player 4.1. All working well, performance over the WEB OK, all fine and dandy.

Then came JW player 5.1 with x264 playback. Mmmm, an encode test with x264 for the same bitrate gave quite an improvement. Needless to say x264 in an flv container wouldn’t work properly. Next snag jitter when using ffmpeg to encode, but was OK when using mencoder, the story goes on as you well know …….

Finally got a good .mp4 file, but then couldn’t use my existing xmoov.php any more (no video displayed). next step try code shops module for apache, and all seemed fine when run locally, but 4 miles down the road over the net a 15 second delay occurred for every seek, back to the drawing board (MP4Box another story), etc, etc ….

Started on psstream but then I came across loomiere which I liked the sound of, fast, standalone. Before I finalise my setup here (and put a page together for other frustrated soles) I want to be sure JW player 5.1 is going to work, needless to say the couple of attempts I’ve had so far have failed, disappointment is fast becoming my new friend!

What I need now (to keep away the red herrings) is a proven working example of the syntax required on a web page for JW Player 5.1 using loomier server. Do you know where I can find such an example? Alternatively, maybe I could use the player you have in the demo if JW is known to be a problem for whatever reason. What player is being used on the demo site? Going to switch the screen off for a couple of days now, but I’ll be back.

Thanks for your time.

Laurie

By: valeriup

valeriup — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:04:43 +0000

It would be very nice to see it running on Fedora as well although I don’t know if there are any binary RPM packages for ipsvd/runit under Fedora. You could try compiling and installing the manually, or using CheckInstall to make packages out of the source code (to keep your system clean):

RUNIT: http://smarden.org/runit/install.html
IPSVD: http://smarden.org/ipsvd/install.html

I looked around a bit as well and found the following package for RUNIT under Fedora (may work for you): http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/12680114/dir/fedora_other/com/runit-1.8.0-1.i386.rpm.html

For IPSVD nothing came up though . Maybe an RPM built for another distribution will still work since IPSVD only consists of a few executable files placed in the global path and some docs (RUNIT is a bit more complex): http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=ipsvd&system=&arch=

In any event, please let me know if you need more help with this. God speed.

By: Laurie

Laurie — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:38:49 +0000

Some nice work. I’ve started on setting things up. I’m using Fedora and don’t have the like’s of ipsvd-cdb & /usr/bin/sv. I’ll report back on progress. Keep up the good work.

By: valeriup

valeriup — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:59:32 +0000

Hi, sorry about the delay, the source is now freely available under GPLv3. See this post for an update.

By: Rv

Rv — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:28:21 +0000

Hi, hopefully waiting to see … what it is !
Even a demo … running …
It’s been 3 months, you’re stuck with legal concerns …

A bit long for people following you … give us some news about all this stuff

Thanks

By: bmigette

bmigette — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:46:44 +0000

hi, i think I’m looking for something like this, so let us know when this annoying legal stuff will be ok, but as all things that goes this way, I have no big hope it’ll be soon

By: CBY

CBY — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:29:12 +0000

Hey,
I just faced the difficulties of h264 streaming. I was testing different methods from rtmp (red5) to apache/lighttpd modules (from code-shop) but I wasn’t satisfied with the results I got. Then I found your psstream extension which seemed to be good enough for me, but as you said, many things happened since it was made.
I read this post and I knew that Loomiere is what I really need. It’s just doing what it needs to, streaming the media. (A complete media server would be just too much for me, I just want to stream flv and h264.)
I hope the issues with the legal terms will be solved soon, so I could give it a try.
Nice job!

By: valeriup

valeriup — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:20:46 +0000

@Arjen: Thanks a bunch an I think that’s right: It’s impossible for now to make a decent comparison between the two. I will also post some charts showing traffic and system indicators from our streaming servers. Very soon I promise!

From what I can tell right now (from your charts and what my cluster shows me), Loomiere/Stream yields more throughput and more simultaneous connections but at the same time the CPU has higher iowait times than mod_h264_streaming. I also believe that there is currently more context switching being done in Loomiere/Stream due to the one-process-per-request architecture. I am certain that a lot could be done to balance and fine-tune this streamer.

I’ll try to get back with charts as soon as I will have some time for it.

Good job, and also Godspeed on your projects,

Valeriu

By: arjen

arjen — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:50:43 +0000

Hi,

Interesting read!

Please find a benchmark with some figures/pictures of the mod_h264_streaming module on the following page: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac/wiki/Mod-H264-Streaming-Performance-Version2

It’s difficult to compare the figures from the two modules as there are a lot of variables (system, webserver, average duration of the videos, filesize of the videos, etc..

When I have time I’ll install your module and try to do a comparison.

Good luck with your projects,

Arjen