LiveStreamer

Live STANAG 4609 re-streamer utility

LiveStreamer utility provides STANAG file recasting services. You can emulate live STANAG streaming to udp unicast / multicast or file targets. The file can be streamed in a loop (video ant TS timestamps are restamped to fully simulate live streaming).

As MPEG format uses 33 bit for the PTS timestamps, they will eventually (2^33 / 90000 kHz = about 26.5 hours) come to wraparound for the continuous sources. If you use a file instead of live streaming, simply sending it as is, this will happen after every loop. Many applications rely on continuously increasing timestamps, for example, DVR timestamp-based seeking may only handle a natural wraparound - one wrap without introducing any additional inconsistencies. If a stream has many sudden changes to its timeline, the timestamp based seeking won't work. LiveStreamer ensures that the looped content will have its timestamps fixed.

Available for Windows and Linux.

There are 2 modes of operation:

• Video pass-through
• Info overlay

Video pass-through

Original video and data pids are remultiplexed (no video transcoding).

Info overlay

The video is transcoded and overlaid with some info useful for testing. Note that this mode requires more PC resources (depending on resolution and encoding presets) and video quality will of course degrade (generation loss).

Video overlay shows the following info:

• Date / Time
• Video PTS in seconds (PTS wraparounds are taken into account, so it is an accumulated time)
• Frame count
  Video resolution, bitrate and profile are taken from the source file. It is possible to override the bitrate and profile.

Usage

Basic demo usage. Unicast streaming:

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o udp://192.168.1.26:30122

Basic demo usage. Multicast streaming:

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o udp://227.1.1.1:30122

Note. You can select specific output network interface (add localaddr=) and packet (add pkt_size=) size for streaming. For example:

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o "udp://227.1.1.1:30122?localaddr=192.168.1.28&pkt_size=1316"

Running with a license (as arguments), infinite loop:

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o udp://227.1.1.1:30122 --licenseFile "C:/Doc/MyLicense.lic" --licenseKey 8CFE4E49-ABDE1B14-159A70E4-BDFF67AB

Note, you can just copy the license files to the current directory.

Loop file 5 times.

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o udp://227.1.1.1:30122 -l 4

Overlaying time, pts and frame count.

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o udp://227.1.1.1:30122 --overlay true

Saving to file:

liveStreamer -i C:/Movie/stanagFile.ts -o c:/tmp/file.ts

Options

Flag	Name	Description
-i	--input	Input File path
-o	--output	Output url
-l	--loop	Loop. Number of times the file shall be looped. Loop 0 means no loop, -1 (default) infinite
	--serviceName	Custom service name. Default - Live
	--overlay	Overlay info (true / false). Note, this will transcode the video
-c	--color	Overlay color.
	--vb	Video bitrate. If not set, the original bitrate will be used for transcoding'
	--preset	Encoding preset (ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow). Default - ultrafast.
	--profile	Profile. baseline, main, high. Default - original file profile, if supported, or 'Main'
	--licenseFile	License file
	--licenseKey	License Key
	--printUsage	Print args description (true/false)

UDP output options

Additionally, you can add arguments to the output udp url.
Options contain a list of &-separated options of the form key=val. Use ? before the first one.

The list of supported options:

buffer_size=size
Set the UDP maximum socket buffer size in bytes. Default is 32 KB for output.

bitrate=bitrate
If set to nonzero, the output will have the specified constant bitrate if the input has enough packets to sustain it.

burst_bits=bits
When using bitrate this specifies the maximum number of bits in packet bursts.

localport=port
Override the local UDP port to bind with.

localaddr=addr
Local IP address of a network interface used for sending packets or joining multicast groups.

pkt_size=size
Set the size in bytes of UDP packets.

reuse=1|0
Explicitly allow or disallow reusing UDP sockets.

ttl=ttl
Set the time to live value (for multicast only).

connect=1|0
Initialize the UDP socket with connect(). In this case, the destination address can’t be changed with ff_udp_set_remote_url later. If the destination address isn’t known at the start, this option can be specified in ff_udp_set_remote_url, too. This allows finding out the source address for the packets with getsockname, and makes writes return with AVERROR(ECONNREFUSED) if "destination unreachable" is received.

broadcast=1|0 Explicitly allow or disallow UDP broadcasting.

Note that broadcasting may not work properly on networks having broadcast storm protection.

Sample:

udp://hostname:port?pkt_size=188&buffer_size=65535

License

Application without license will work in demo mode (for about 10 min). In order to lift demo restrictions you should provide the license using one of two options:

• passing license info as the arguments (with --licenseFile and --licenseKey)
• copying license file (.lic) and a key (.txt) file into a current working directory