a stupid simple RTMP Server in a Container/Docker

with ffmpeg

Context:

When testing RTMP connections with ffmpeg or gstreamer I mostly used the nginx-rtmp-module which is of course brilliant !!!

---

For commercial and Enterprise RTMP-LIVE-Streaming

please look at BITMOVIN !

https://bitmovin.com/encoding-service

and their RTMP-examples:

https://github.com/bitmovin/bitmovin-api-sdk-examples

This repository provides examples demonstrating usage of the
Bitmovin API SDKs in different programming languages.

---

But using this was sometimes a bit unhandy, so I wanted to just do it with a simple `ffmpeg`-cli command.

ffmpeg provides a listener mode for RTMP, so this was simple (after I found out that listening at localhost in my case did not work).

ffmpeg -f flv -listen 1 -i rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/ ...

this worked like a charm for testing with OBS for example.

After I had a good script I wanted to port it to docker and wanted to amke it stable, means not abort after I diconnected with OBS. This is why I used supervisord in this container, as I never before used it but already stumbled upon it a couple of times.

This was a good opportunity to use it for the first time!

How it works ?

1. install ffmpeg from the static johnvansickle.com-ffmpeg-builds
2. use a bash-script to create a MPEG-DASH-stream and create thumbnails with ffmpeg
3. look that it is always running by the use of supervisord

...

build it

docker build -t riha/rtmp-server-ffmpeg .

or ignore the cache

docker build --no-cache -t riha/rtmp-server-ffmpeg .

run it

docker run -it -p 1935:1935 -v $PWD/out:/output riha/rtmp-server-ffmpeg:latest

- make sure that the out-Folder on the host has a dash- & thumbs-subfolder !

TODO:

• configure ABR for DASH with a JSON-File -> https://starkandwayne.com/blog/bash-for-loop-over-json-array-using-jq/
• add config params for this server
  • RTMP-PORT
  • ABR-CONFIG-FILE
  • THUMBNAIL-FREQUENCY in seconds
  • OUPUT-FOLDER