Multi bitrate live HLS with FFmpeg on Windows

Question

I am trying to encode a live stream into Apple HLS for iPhone on windows. I was looking at different options and wowza can do it, but doesn't support CDN distribution of HLS as far as I can see. Plus it costs a lot of money.

What I did find was this site: http://www.espend.de/artikel/iphone-ipad-ipod-http-streaming-segmenter-and-m3u8-windows.html

I can now set up a single bitrate stream easily, but my goal is an adapive multi-bitrate live stream. Is it possible? For VOD content it can easily be accomplished with creating the different qualities then linking to them in a new m3u8, but how would this be done in live?

I can of course set up three quality live streams and link to them in an m3u8, but how will I get them GOP-aligned in this case?

My initial thought was to have one ffmpeg instance create all qualities and re-stream those outputs to new ffmpeg-instances that just remux and pipe to the segmenter. But I would need some way of streaming locally between instances. Can that be done?

If anyone has a nice solution to this, or can link to other software capable of live HLS on windows, I would appreciate any input.

Have a great day! Regards Carl

Answer 1

Just to let people know, I ended up using http://www.ioncannon.net/projects/http-live-video-stream-segmenter-and-distributor/ on a linux virtualbox and it works great. I had trouble compiling it, but there were a couple of forks that fixed those problems.