Object Storage Service (OSS) allows you to use Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to ingest H.264-encoded video streams and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)-encoded audio streams to OSS. Audio and video data uploaded to OSS can be played on demand or be used for live streaming in latency-insensitive scenarios.

When you upload audio and video data to OSS in compliance with RTMP, take note of the following limits:

  • You can only ingest video or audio streams but not pull the streams if you use RTMP.
  • The uploaded audio and video data must include H.264 video streams.
  • You can select whether to include audio streams in the audio and video data. If you want to include audio streams, only AAC audio streams are supported. Auto streams in other formats are discarded.
  • You can use only HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) to store audio and video data in OSS.
  • A LiveChannel can receive streams ingested from only one client at a time.

The following sections describe how to ingest audio and video streams to OSS and how to play the uploaded audio and video data on demand and for live streaming.

Ingest audio and video streams to OSS

  • Obtain an ingest URL

    Use an SDK to call the PutLiveChannel operation, create a LiveChannel, and then obtain the corresponding ingest URL. If the bucket ACL is set to public read/write, you can directly use the obtained ingest URL. Otherwise, add a signature to the ingest URL.

    The following code uses the Python SDK in the example to show how to obtain an ingest URL without a signature and how to obtain a signed ingest URL: 

    from oss2 import *
from oss2.models import *
host = "oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com" #just for example
accessid = "your-access-id"
accesskey = "your-access-key"
bucket_name = "your-bucket"
channel_name = "test-channel"
auth = Auth(accessid, accesskey)
bucket = Bucket(auth, host, bucket_name)
channel_cfg = LiveChannelInfo(target = LiveChannelInfoTarget())
channel = bucket.create_live_channel(channel_name, channel_cfg)
publish_url = channel.publish_url
signed_publish_url = bucket.sign_rtmp_url("test-channel", "playlist.m3u8", 3600)

    The following example shows the obtained ingest URLs:

    publish_url = rtmp://your-bucket.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/live/test-channel
signed_publish_url = rtmp://your-bucket.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/live/your-channel?OSSAccessKeyId=LGarxxxxxxHjKWg6&playlistName=t.m3u8&Expires=1472201595&Signature=bjKraZTTyzz9%2FpYoomDx4Wgh%2FlM%3D"
  • Use FFmpeg for stream ingest

    You can use FFmpeg to upload local video objects to OSS by running the following command:

    ffmpeg -i 1.flv -c copy -f flv "rtmp://your-bucket.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/live/test-channel?OSSAccessKeyId=LGarxxxxxxHjKWg6&Expires=1472199095&Signature=%2FAvRo7FTss1InBKgwn7Gz%2FUlp9w%3D"
  • Use OBS for stream ingest

    Click Settings. In the URL field, enter the ingest URL that you obtain in the preceding step, and then click OK.

    Take note of how the ingest URL is split based on the following figure.

Play the audio and video data uploaded to OSS

  • Live streaming

    During stream ingest, you can use HLS to play the audio and video content that is being uploaded on the following platforms in different ways:

    • On mobile platforms such as Android and iOS, enter the corresponding streaming URL of a LiveChannel in the browser.
    • On the macOS platform, use Safari to play the content.
    • On a PC, install the VLC media player to play the content.

    To smoothly play the uploaded audio and video data for live streaming, you can set FragDuration to a small value such as 2s. You can also set the group of pictures (GOP) to a fixed value, which is the same as that of FragDuration of the LiveChannel. The following figure shows how to set the GOP (Keyframe Interval) in OBS.

  • Playback on demand

    When you ingest a stream, OSS uses live streaming to push or update M3U8 objects. In on-demand playback scenarios, you must call the PostVodPlaylist operation after stream ingest to assemble an M3U8 object for on-demand playback and use the object URL to play the uploaded audio and video data.

    In on-demand playback scenarios, you can set a larger GOP to reduce the number of TS objects and the bit rate.