galene-stream 0.1.6

Gateway to send streams to Galène videoconference server.

Galène streaming gateway

Gateway to send streams such as RTMP or SRT to Galène videoconference server. It is based on Gstreamer and implements the Galène protocol.

:warning: This project is not production ready, and you might experience jittering and crashes. See future plans.

Installation

Real-time video conversion requires resources. If many users are going to use this gateway simultaneously, you should scale your machine resources accordingly.

Installation works on Ubuntu 20.10 and Debian Bullseye or any later version.

For Windows users, we recommend to use Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Dependencies

# On Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions
sudo apt install python3-gi python3-gi-cairo python3-websockets gir1.2-gst-plugins-bad-1.0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-nice

# On ArchLinux-based distributions
sudo pacman -S python-setuptools python-pip python-websockets python-gobject gobject-introspection gst-python gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gst-libav

# On NixOS
nix-shell -p gobject-introspection -p gst_all_1.gst-libav -p gst_all_1.gst-plugins-bad -p gst_all_1.gst-plugins-base -p gst_all_1.gst-plugins-good -p gst_all_1.gst-plugins-ugly -p libnice -p python3 -p python3Packages.gst-python -p python3Packages.pygobject3 -p python3Packages.websockets

Then you should be able to either run ./galene-stream.py in this repository, or install it using pip.

Configuration for UDP streaming

Launch the gateway using:

galene-stream --input "udp://127.0.0.1:8888" --output "wss://galene.example.com/ws" --group test --username bot

Then you can stream to udp://127.0.0.1:8888 with no stream key.

Configuration for RTMP streaming

+--------------------+      +----------+      +-------------+        +------+
|Streaming software  | RTMP |NGINX RTMP| RTMP |Galène Stream| WebRTC |Galène|
|(such as OBS-Studio)+------>  Server  <------+   Gateway   +-------->      |
+--------------------+      +----------+      +-------------+        +------+

You need a NGINX RTMP server, you may remix the provided nginx.conf. You can launch NGINX as user using:

nginx -c nginx.conf -p $PWD

You may launch the gateway after the NGINX server using:

galene-stream --input "rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/test" --output "wss://galene.example.com/ws" --group test --username bot

Then you can stream to rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live with stream key test.

Configuration for SRT streaming

SRT support is still experimental in some Linux distributions. It has been reported to work on ArchLinux (on 2021/03/30).

When using OBS, you need to have FFMpeg compiled with SRT support. To check if SRT is available, run ffmpeg -protocols | grep srt. On Windows and MacOS, OBS comes with his own FFMpeg that will work.

Launch the gateway using:

galene-stream --input "srt://127.0.0.1:9710?mode=listener" --output "wss://galene.example.com/ws" --group test --username bot

Then you can stream to srt://127.0.0.1:9710 with no stream key.

More information on OBS Wiki, Streaming With SRT Or RIST Protocols.

Configuration for file streaming

For debugging purposes you can directly stream a file,

galene-stream --input "file://source.webm" --output "wss://galene.example.com/ws" --group test --username bot

Contributing

We welcome contributions that stays in the scope of this project. Please format your code using black and test it using pytest.

Collecting statistics about GStreamer WebRTC element

During a stream, you can send !webrtc in the chat to get some statistics about the connectivity between the gateway and Galène.

Debugging GStreamer pipeline

Logging pipeline statistics

You may use these environment variables,

GST_DEBUG="GST_TRACER:7" GST_TRACERS="latency;stats;rusage" GST_DEBUG_FILE=trace.log

Then you may inspect logs using gst-stats-1.0 trace.log.

Plotting pipeline graph

It is possible to plot pipeline status just before exiting the script by setting GST_DEBUG_DUMP_DOT_DIR environnement variable to a directory.

For example, export GST_DEBUG_DUMP_DOT_DIR=..

Then you can use GraphViz to generate an image from the dot file: dot -Tpng pipeline.dot > pipeline.png.

Future plans

The WISH IETF workgroup is working on the WebRTC-HTTP ingestion protocol (WHIP). Galène has an experimental branch whip implementing a WHIP server. OBS Studio is currently working (as of December 2022) on adding WHIP output support.

Using WHIP directly removes the need for a transcoding gateway, and make streamers life simpler. Galène-stream should be considered as a temporary solution until WHIP gets standardized and implemented.

License

This gateway is developed by former members of Crans and Aurore network organizations to build a self-hosted free and open-source streaming server based on Galène.

We believe in open source software. This project is licensed under MIT.