What Is FFmpeg Streaming ?
FFmpeg is a Powerful Media Tool used for Muxing, Demuxing, Transcoding, Encoding, Streaming and Filtering. This tool is accessed by typing different commands in Command Prompt. This tool is having FFmpeg player as well as a ffmpeg stream analyzer.
To stream a content for different players using FFmpeg Tool is known as FFmpeg Streaming.
Know more about FFmpeg here.
So today in this article we will see How FFmpeg is used for Streaming a Media Content ?
Working Of FFmpeg Streaming
As shown above in the figure there are two FFmpeg content input sources for FFserver. These two ffmpeg input content sources can be anywhere in the world. These sources are directly connected to a single FFserver to provide the content as input.
Thus input content from different ffmpeg input sources are received by the ffserver which then streams this received content for different players. This streaming is done at different bit rates for different players. as per their need.
These players can be VLC Player, Mplayer and FFplay etc.
As shown above in the figure this is detailed diagram for implementation of ffmpeg for streaming a media content. There are two sections known as Input Section and Output Section.
Feed Elementes = Feed 1, Feed 2 & Feed 3
Stream Elementes = Stream 1, Stream 2, Stream 3 & Stream 4
At the Input Section there are three ffmpeg input content sources (Source 1, Source 2 and Source 3) each connected with three different Feed Element of the ffserver. These ffmpeg input content sources are streaming to ffserver input content. These feed elements are associated with Stream Elements to provide content for streaming.
So ffmpeg input content sources as well as Feed Elements both comes under Input Section.
At the Output Section Stream Elements and Players comes these two things are working. The Stream Elemets are receiving the content from Feed Elements. Then these Streaming Elements are streaming the content at different profile for players available in the market.
As shown above Stream Element 4 is providing two different profile streams one for player 2 and another one for player 3.
Where these media players are Windows Media Player, VLC Media Player and FFplayer.
Thus ffserver is made of two elements that are Feed Elements and Stream Elements.
Below mentioned command is used for to start your ffserver. Keep in mind one thing that your configuration file should be ok then only it will run.
ffserver -f /etc/ffserver.conf
On the other hand if you want to run your ffserver in debug mode then follow the command,
ffserver -d -f /etc/ffserver.conf
If you want to open help then you can follow the command for ffserver,
ffserver –help
Applications Of FFmpeg
(1) Broadcasting a Live Stream Of Video Content
(2) Conversion Of Codecs from one to another
(3) Cropping and Rotating A Media File
(4) Conversion of Mono Audio File to Stereo Audio File
(5) Removing and adjusting Audio Of A File
(6) Scaling Of A Video
(7) Replacing The One Audio With Another Audio for a Video File.
(8) Recording Of Audio Streaming and Video Streaming, where input streaming sources can be different
Conclusion Of FFmpeg Streaming
FFmpeg is a media framework, converting the codecs of media files. Which supports various different media file formats to convert a high quality media file into different low quality media files and audio files too. So this is open source code used in different applications to facilitate them.
This tool is also used for streaming a media content all over the world from different content input sources. There are various streaming solution providers which uses this tool for Streaming Media.
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