Create a Golang Video Streaming Server Using HLS – A Tutorial

Video Streaming Server In Go Using HLS

The post Create a Golang Video Streaming Server Using HLS – A Tutorial first appeared on Qvault.

In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through building a Golang video streaming API (this works for other types of media as well!). Don’t worry, its surprisingly easy to build a robust media streaming server, especially if we utilize one of the more modern protocols, HLS.

What is HLS?

HTTP Live Streaming is an HTTP-Based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

HLS allows us to serve large media files as many smaller text files that are broken up into ~10-second increments. By breaking them up in this way, our user’s client-side app only needs to buffer 10 seconds in advance. This saves the user a lot of potential bandwidth and allows the song or video to start playback almost immediately.

Using FFmpeg, we can easily convert mp3 files to HLS format, which consists of multiple files. One of these files contains the metadata (.m3u8) and is served first. This metadata file tells the client where to get each data file, and what each data file contains. The data files have a .ts extension and typically contain ~10 seconds of audio and are served one-at-a-time at the client’s request.

FFmpeg

Get Started – Format Some Media for your Server

Download a sample .mp3:

http://www.hubharp.com/web_sound/BachGavotteShort.mp3

Install FFmpeg. If you are on a Mac:

brew install ffmpeg

Navigate to the directory of the mp3 file and run

ffmpeg -i BachGavotteShort.mp3 -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 128k -map 0:0 -f segment -segment_time 10 -segment_list outputlist.m3u8 -segment_format mpegts output%03d.ts

This should result in three new files:

output000.ts output001.ts outputlist.m3u8

Congratulations! You are done with the hard part, you now have simple files that can be served over HTTP. Any modern client-side media library will know how to read HLS files.

Building the Streaming Server

As I eluded to above, HLS is very simple on the server-side. All we need to do is serve a path to the .m3u8 file, and make sure the .ts files are served from the same path. In traditional file server architecture, this just means that they need to be in the same directory.

Let’s set up our project with the following folder structure:

Screen Shot 2019 12 03 at 8.57.28 AM

Copy the following code into main.go:

package main

import (
        "fmt"
        "log"
        "net/http"
)

func main() {
        // configure the songs directory name and port
        const songsDir = "songs"
        const port = 8080

        // add a handler for the song files
        http.Handle("/", addHeaders(http.FileServer(http.Dir(songsDir))))
        fmt.Printf("Starting server on %v\n", port)
        log.Printf("Serving %s on HTTP port: %v\n", songsDir, port)

        // serve and log errors
        log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(fmt.Sprintf(":%v", port), nil))
}

// addHeaders will act as middleware to give us CORS support
func addHeaders(h http.Handler) http.HandlerFunc {
        return func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
                w.Header().Set("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*")
                h.ServeHTTP(w, r)
        }
}

Now run your server:

go run main.go

Your server is live! Test your music play by using a media client. You can find a free online client here: https://hls-js-latest.netlify.com/demo/

Simply paste your song’s URI and listen:

http://localhost:8080/bachgavotteshort/outputlist.m3u8

Thanks For Reading!

Follow us on Twitter @q_vault if you have any questions or comments

Take some coding courses on our new platform

Subscribe to our Newsletter for more programming articles

Related Articles


– Building an HLS Streaming Server in Go 
– Lint on Save With VS Code Official Golang Extension 
– Running Go in the Browser With Web Assembly (WASM)



source https://qvault.io/2020/09/04/golang-video-stream-server/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is Exclusive Or (XOR) Important in Cryptography?

Image
If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the exclusive-or operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers. What is XOR ( ⊕ )? XOR, or “exclusive or” operates on binary data. It returns true if both of its inputs are opposites (one false and one true), otherwise, it returns false. An example in go code would be something like: func exclusiveOr(a bool, b bool) bool { return a != b } XOR Cipher – The Perfect Cipher The XOR operation can be used as a simple cipher for encrypting and decrypting messages with a single key. This is known as symmetric encryption. It is interesting to note that if: The key is the same size as the message The key is kept secret and generated truly randomly Then the cipher is impossible to crack. This is known as a one time pad . However, a simple XOR shouldn’t be used in production due to the key length needing to be too long to be practical. Cipher Example A...
Read more

Base64 vs Base58 Encoding

Image
By Lane Wagner –  @wagslane  on Twitter Base64 is one of the most popular encoding formats for representing data. Have some binary data? Base64 encode it for convenient readability and parsing. Base58 is just another encoding format (with 58 characters instead of 64, and has gained popularity largely due to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When it comes to data encoding, there is typically a trade-off made between: Human Readability: Do humans have a good idea of what is being represented at a glance? Efficient data compression: How many bytes are used to represent the same data? Let’s rank Base58, Base64, and ASCII encoding against each other using these metrics! First: A Note on Binary All data is stored in a raw binary format on computers. These encoding formats (Base64, Base58, and ASCII) are just different ways of reading and writing binary data. For example, in Base64 the binary code 000000 represents the letter A , but in ASCII the binary 00000000 repres...
Read more

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD-5, etc)

Image
This is going to be a basic introduction to hash functions. I will assume most of my audience is here to gain an understanding of why hash functions are used and the basic idea of why they work. My goal is to explain it in a general sense, I will be omitting proofs and implementation details and instead focusing on the high-level principles. Why Use A Hash Function? Hash functions are used all over the internet in order to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, and more. For example,  Qvault  uses hashes to extend master passwords into private encryption keys. A longer list of uses here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Uses I want to focus on several important features of hash functions, arguably the most important features. Hash functions scramble data deterministically No matter the input, the output of a hash function always has the same size The original data can not be retrieved from the scrambled d...
Read more