Live stream multi-bitrate video

Question

Preface

I have read this two part tutorial (Part-1 and Part-2) by Steamroot on MPEG-DASH, and below is my understanding (please correct me if I am wrong):

• The video needs to be encoded into multiple bit-rates using FFmpeg.
• The encoded videos need to be transcoded (dashified) using MP4Box.
• The dashified videos can be served using a web server.

Problem

I intend to live-stream an event and I need help to understand the following:

1. Can I club the FFmpeg and MP4Box commands into a single step? Maybe through a wrapper program so that I do not have to run them separately? Is there any other or better solution?
2. How do I send the dashified content to the web server? FTP? Would any vanilla web server do?
3. Lastly, a friend had hinted that I could also use GStreamer to achieve my objective. But, I could not find any good resource on the internet for the same. So, where (and how) does GStreamer fit in the above process?

Answer 1

1. What is the format you will be getting out of your camera for your live-event? There are a lot of solutions a lot more adapted for live streaming (the tutorial I wrote is for VOD streams only). You can check out simple solutions like Wowza Streaming Server, Nible streamer (free), etc, that take a RTMP stream and transform it into other formats (HLS, DASH, etc...). Most of the livestreaming platforms can even do that for you (livestream.com, youtube, twitch, or even facebook now)

2. The dashified content will be requested as HTTP ressources by the browser or other players. In the case of a VoD stream, indeed you just need to make the dash segments available through a web-server. For live content, you need something smarter, that will encode, package the segments and make them available on the fly.

3. Gstreamer can transcode and transmux the original content, and can do it on the fly. You will be able to get different formats as outputs, like RTMP, HLS, and probably even mpeg-dash. Then you still need to make your content available via a webserver.

In conclusion, if you just want to transmit an occasional live event, it's probably a lot easier a platform that will ingest your RTMP stream and do all the complicated steps for you.