Ask HN: Modern live streaming solutions for the web

6 points·alanz1223··6 comments

Now that Blab has shut down, it renewed my interest in live streaming. Last time I approached the problem, the consensus was to use Flash for RTMP. After Chrome has renounced support for it, I would like to know what other solutions are currently available. I know WebRTC is one, but peer-to-peer streaming has its limitations. How did services like Blab do it? Is it through Websockets?

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Check out HLS. Based on http so no special ports or udp. Also support HTTPS. And you should reconsider WebRTC, it's amazing.

I've been wanting to try HLS. Seems simple as there's an FFMPEG plugin to generate the folder structure and all I have to do is symlink it to the webserver

How exactly would I stream to the server? Say after I have the camera/audio feed.

With HLS, you process the feed through an encoder (possibly FFMPEG or 3rd party solutions or hardware) which will generate the video packets in various bit rate profiles. It will also generate a playlist file. You just provide a link to the playlist. Check out the HLS specs, it's fairly simple to understand.

Blab used WebRTC. They did this by using OpenTok (made by TokBox).

https://tokbox.com/

https://tokbox.com/developer/

Source: I work there :)

there is a standard called mediasource api

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource

I tried video streaming with it.

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