AWS Adventures, Part 3 – HA Wowza Live HLS

AWS, Technology

For a number of years, we have streamed HLS video via CloudFront, using a Wowza Streaming Engine server to convert our RTMP streams to HLS on the fly. CloudFront provides almost infinite scalability for the HLS stream, since the static chunk files are highly cacheable.

For high availability purposes, we want to use two independent WSE servers in two AWS availability zones. But this has been problematic. The two servers are never 100% in sync with their HLS chunking of the incoming live stream. This can cause the client to get a bad response to a request, thereby dropping the live stream.

After a lot of experimentation, I have come up with a way to assemble a multi-AZ, high availability cluster of WSE servers that can reliably stream HLS video from an incoming RTMP stream.

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Lollapalooza 2017 playlists

Uncategorized

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Lollapalooza for the past 5 years. I really like to do my homework before I go so I know who I want to see. There are always tons of bands I’ve never heard of, and every year, some of them end up being my favorites at the show.

So I build Spotify playlists of every band at Lolla, using recent setlists from setlist.fm whenever it is available. A lot of work goes into this, and I’d like for people to have the chance to use these playlists.

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AWS Adventures, part 2 – high-availability FTP service

AWS, Linux, Technology

In our AWS migration, we found it necessary to run an FTP server. Yeah, I know — “FTP? In the 20-teens?”. Look, I get it — nobody wants to run an FTP server in this day and age. But it is still a convenient way for partner companies to transfer data to us via automation. This isn’t highly sensitive data; our main concern is keeping the FTP server isolated from our other services so that any vulnerabilities there don’t propagate to more critical systems.

At any rate, we found it surprisingly challenging to build a highly available FTP service in AWS.

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Benchmarking QuickSync on Broadwell and Skylake

Linux

We’re in the process of building out some new Linux-based video encoders, and we want to output to a LOT of different destinations: live streams, archived versions on disk, high-quality versions for future editing, JPEG stills, etc.

QuickSync is a great way to get more out of our processors by offloading the encoding to the GPU. To figure out what architecture to invest in, we ran some tests with a Broadwell processor, the Core i7 5775C (3.3 GHz), and a Skylake processor, the Core i7-6700K (4.0 GHz).

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Building FFMPEG with support for Decklink Capture and QuickSync encoding (Skylake edition)

Linux, Technology

NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2017. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2016 with an older processor, see this article.

With the release of Media Server Studio 2017, Intel provides Linux with the ability to leverage QuickSync on Skylake processors. This is a welcome development, as Skylake’s graphics capabilities are significantly better than previous generations of Core processors.

This article outlines how we built ffmpeg to capture video from a Blackmagic Design DeckLink mini and encode it using Intel’s QuickSync technology (h264_qsv).

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