ispooge-live

iSpooge Live

A system for video websites and apps.

No centralization unless you want there to be.

Syndicate in common formats. Sites with the POSSE.

Hosting

The site is built from the ground up to be static with progressive enhancement on the client. It should be able to run offline, and also be enhanced by the latest and greatest cloud services. Video can be hosted as an original file, or transcoded for adaptive web and mobile playback.

It was built on a RasPi to be as constrained an accessible as possible, and to demononstrate the Tiny DataCenter project in action. It could be ported to run on any static web host; current deployment model is a simple Docker container that serves HTTP and static content.

Social Discovery

It's 2018... people can discover your website via word of mouth, ping of text, and RSS aggregators.

Each site has /feed.xml which is an RSS feed of the latest items. In the config.edn file for the project, one can simply add tags to a list like :rss-filters ["ispooge" "video"] and then /ispooge.xml and /video.xml will be exposed with those items filtered.

Feedback

Out of the box, feedback is solicited via Email and Phone number. Those enable a person to get started right away, without setting up IT systems or being concerned with moderation. Many YouTube Live and Twitch channels are based around live feedback, so that could very easily become a priority.

Scalability

Marketing can happen as normal. Being that the mechanics of decentralization are different, the marketing channels and metrics will be different.

The IT scales by separating read and write paths intelligently, with read cache tunable at several levels, and scaling out of the box via CDN.

Usage

Scripts are mostly named with verbs and nouns. Eg. if you scripts/start-A.sh there will be a scripts/stop-A.sh.

From a high level, the site needs to be build with Cryogen before anything can be served. Once it's built, it needs to go into a static container. Around that static container goes the streaming container... in techno babel, the streaming container proxies to the static container.

Media is served from the static container. Dev is currently possible without starting the streaming container, but it's so cheap you should. This will very likely soon change as more rules are added to the nginx.conf file.

Note that we've not taken care to run multiple sites on one box yet... in theory just a few changes need to be made around mapping resources. It should be possible without much trouble.

The example only uses the 360p stream, but you can extrapolate the others. The config is set to take any number; by convention I end it with _size. Adaptive playback is set for 360, 720, 240 in nginx.conf.

Building

• scripts/start-build.sh - starts the Cryogen builder process

Serving

• scripts/build-static.sh - builds a snapshot from what Cryogen has built

• scripts/start-static.sh - starts the snapshot that was built

• scripts/build-streaming.sh - builds the live video streaming server

• scripts/start-streaming.sh - starts the live streamig server we just built

Accessing

Connect to http://$HOST:33936/ and browse to Live on the menu bar, or go direct to http://$HOST:33936/live-360p.html.

Publishing

Publish an RTMP stream such as OBS or a webcam to rtmp://$HOST:33935/ispoogedaily_local/ispoogedaily_360.

For the best results, you should use the transcoding options available... to do this you publish instead to rtmp://$HOST:33935/ispoogedaily_source/ispoogedaily_360 and then run the transcoding script scripts/transcode-stream-360p.sh. This script is optimized for RasPi3's H264 accelerated hardware.

Syndicating

Copy the RTMP stream you wish to syndicate upstream... usually the highest quality variant:

• ffmpeg -i rtmp://$HOST:33935/ispoogedaily_local/ispoogedaily_720 -c copy -f flv rtmp://_____

License

Project is available under the MIT license. Please contact us for customizations; we prefer to keep them public and MIT licensed.