Xerb Transcode Everything
A server to change input videos into MPEG-DASH and HLS output files.
This works more or less like a replacement to Amazon ETS or similar.
You will need to have Docker CE installed: https://docs.docker.com/install/
You can run the container using the docker command line tool. If you're not
familiar with using it, the Getting Started guide is quite good:
https://docs.docker.com/get-started/
From this directory, build the container:
docker build .
Then, to run the app:
docker run -t -p 8080:8080 [IMAGE]
Remember that you can list images using docker images if you don't know the
image id.
Standing on the shoulders of gigantes
ffmpeg is a CLI utility to encode, decode, mux, and demux video and audio files, among other things.
You can check it out here: http://ffmpeg.org/
We expect ffmpeg will first be called from within a Python API, likely by using subprocess.run().
mp4box, part of the GPAC Multimedia Open Source Project, does quite a few things, but for our purposes it's used to generate the XML files needed for MPEG-DASH streaming.
You can check it out here: https://gpac.wp.imt.fr/mp4box/
Like ffmpeg, we expect mp4box will be invoked from within a Python API, again probably with suprocess.run().
We would love to use MPEG-DASH for everything, because it's an open standard defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO), and has the best feature set. This is why MPEG-DASH is used.
Unfortunately, iOS currently still doesn't support MPEG-DASH, because it has no support for Media Source Extensions (MSE). This is why HLS is used.