---

DASH video-streaming and RTMP live-streaming platform.

Features

• DASH Video Streaming
• RTMP Live Streaming
• Live Chat (WebSocket)
• Highly Scalable Transcoder Nodes
• GPU Accelerated Video Transcoding
• Ratify Authentication

DASH

With DASH streaming, videos uploaded to cast are first re-encoded by the Transcoder nodes (cast-is) to multiple resolutions (240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). The video player selects the most suitable resolution, and transitions between them seamlessly, based on the client's available bandwidth and preferences.

RTMP

RTMP streaming allows the users to stream live to their viewers via a direct uplink to cast's servers. Users can use clients such as OBS Studio or Streamlabs.

GPU Hardware Acceleration

Uploaded videos are ingested by cast's transcoding nodes (cast-is) powered with NVIDIA CUDA GPU hardware acceleration. These transcoders are highly scalable and can be deployed with a high number of replica either on- or off-premise.

With GPU acceleration, h264_nvenc encoder is used. On environments without GPU, cast-is can also be started to use CPU encoding only using libx264 encoder.

Test Stream

You can use FFmpeg to create a test livestream. Use the following command:

$ ffmpeg -f lavfi -re -i testsrc2=s=1920x1080:r=60,format=yuv420p -f lavfi -i sine=f=440:b=4 -ac 2 -c:a pcm_s16le -c:v libx264 -f flv rtmp://cast.daystram.com/live/STREAM_KEY

This will create a sample 1080p 60 FPS stream with a 440 Hz sine wave sound. Ensure the stream key is provided correctly and stream window has been opened in the Dashboard.

Services

The application comes in three parts:

Name	Code Name	Stack
Back-end	cast-be	Go, BeeGo, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, S3
Transcoder	cast-is	Go, FFmpeg, RabbitMQ, S3
Front-end	cast-fe	JavaScript, React

Develop

cast-be

cast-be uses Go Modules module/dependency manager, hence at least Go 1.11 is required. BeeGo provides Bee development tool which live-reloads the application. Install the tool as documented.

To begin developing, simply enter the sub-directory and run the development server:

$ cd cast-be
$ go mod tidy
$ bee run

cast-is

cast-is uses Go Modules module/dependency manager, hence at least Go 1.11 is required. To ease development, comstrek/air is used to live-reload the application. Install the tool as documented.

To begin developing, simply enter the sub-directory and run the development server:

$ cd cast-is
$ go mod tidy
$ air

cast-fe

Populate .env.development with the required credentials.

To begin developing, simply enter the sub-directory and run the development server:

$ cd cast-fe
$ yarn
$ yarn serve

Deploy

cast-be, cast-is, and cast-fe are containerized and pushed to Docker Hub. They are tagged based on their application name and version, e.g. daystram/cast:be or daystram/cast:be-v2.0.1.

To run cast-be, run the following:

$ docker run --name cast-be --env-file ./.env -p 8080:8080 -d daystram/cast:be

To run cast-is, run the following:

$ docker run --name cast-is --env-file ./.env -d daystram/cast:is

And cast-fe as follows:

$ docker run --name cast-fe -p 80:80 -d daystram/cast:fe

Dependencies

The following are required for cast-be to function properly:

• MongoDB
• RabbitMQ
• S3 storage provider

The following are required for cast-is to function properly:

• RabbitMQ
• S3 storage provider

Their credentials must be provided in their respective services' configuration file.

Any S3 storage provider such as AWS S3 are supported. For this particular deployment for cast.daystram.com, a self-hosted MinIO is used.

Helm Chart

To deploy to a Kubernetes cluster, Helm charts could be used. Add the repository:

$ helm repo add daystram https://charts.daystram.com
$ helm repo update

Ensure you have the secrets created for cast-be and cast-is by providing the secret name in values.yaml, or creating the secret from a populated .env file (make sure it is on the same namespace as cast installation):

$ kubectl create secret generic secret-cast-be --from-env-file=.cast-be.env
$ kubectl create secret generic secret-cast-is --from-env-file=.cast-is.env

And install cast:

$ helm install cast daystram/cast

You can override the chart values by providing a values.yaml file via the --values flag.

Pre-release and development charts are accessible using the --devel flag. To isntall the development chart, provide the --set image.tag=dev flag, as development images are deployed with the suffix dev.

Docker Compose

For ease of deployment, the following docker-compose.yml file can be used to orchestrate the stack deployment:

version: "3"
services:
  cast-be:
    image: daystram/cast:be
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
      - "1935:1935"
    env_file:
      - /path_to_env_file/.env
    restart: unless-stopped
  cast-is: # no attached GPU
    image: daystram/cast:is
    env_file:
      - /path_to_env_file/.env
    restart: unless-stopped
  cast-fe:
    image: daystram/cast:fe
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    restart: unless-stopped
  mongodb:
    image: mongo:4.4-bionic
    environment:
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME: MONGODB_USER
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD: MONGODB_PASS
    expose:
      - 27017
    volumes:
      - /path_to_mongo_data:/data/db
    restart: unless-stopped
  rabbitmq:
    image: rabbitmq:3.8-alpine
    environment:
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER: RABBITMQ_USER
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS: RABBITMQ_PASS
    expose:
      - 5672
    restart: unless-stopped

GPU Containers

The Transcoder service cast-is is able to utilize GPU (NVIDIA graphics cards only) for harware accelerated video transcoding. To enable this, simply set the environment USE_CUDA=true when running the container.

Docker Engine also needs to be configured to allow GPU passthrough. Follow the steps provided here to enable NVIDIA's container-toolkit. Ensure that the host machine already have the GPU drivers installed.

To run cast-is with GPU attached, use the following:

$ docker run --name cast-is --env-file ./.env --gpus all -d daystram/cast:is

For docker-compose.yml, as noted here, use the following:

version: "3"
services:
  cast-is:
    image: daystram/cast:is
    env_file:
      - /path_to_env_file/.env
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - capabilities:
                - gpu
    restart: unless-stopped

Ingest-Base Image

daystram/ingest-base (DockerHub) is the base image used to build cast-is. This image contains the required tools for the Transcoder to properly re-encode the source videos. The tools required are:

• FFmpeg
• MP4Box + gpac

This image is built on top of NVIDIA's CUDA images to enable FFmpeg harware acceleration on supported hosts. MP4Box is built from source, as seen on the Dockerfile.

MongoDB Indexes

For features to work properly, some indexes needs to be created in the MongoDB instance. Use the following command in mongo CLI to create indexes for the collated video collection:

use MONGODB_NAME;
db.createCollection("video", {collation: {locale: "en", strength: 2}})
db.video.createIndex({title: "text", description: "text"}, {collation: {locale: "simple"}});
db.video.createIndex({hash: "hashed"});

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.