housemaister / hls-stream-creator

Simple Bash Script to take a media file, segment it and create an M3U8 playlist for serving using HLS

HLS-Stream-Creator

Introduction

HLS-Stream-Creator is a simple BASH Script designed to take a media file, segment it and create an M3U8 playlist for serving using HLS. There are numerous tools out there which are far better suited to the task, and offer many more options. This project only exists because I was asked to look into HTTP Live Streaming in depth, so after reading the IETF Draft I figured I'd start with the basics by creating a script to encode arbitrary video into a VOD style HLS feed.

Usage

Usage is incredibly simple

./HLS-Stream-Creator.sh inputfile segmentlength(seconds)

So to split a video file called example.avi into segments of 10 seconds, we'd run

./HLS-Stream-Creator.sh example.avi 10

Output

As of version 1, the HLS resources will be output to the directory output. These will consist of video segments encoded in H.264 with MP3 audio (should be AAC really, but I'd compiled ffmpeg without) and an m3u8 file in the format

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:0
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:10
#EXTINF:10, no desc
example_001.ts
#EXTINF:10, no desc
example_002.ts
#EXTINF:10, no desc
example_003.ts
#EXTINF:5, no desc
example_004.ts
#EXT-X-ENDLIST

Using a Specific FFMPEG binary

There may be occasions where you don't want to use the ffmpeg that appears in PATH. At the top of the script, the ffmpeg command is defined, so change this to suit your needs

FFMPEG='/path/to/different/ffmpeg'

License

HLS-Stream-Creator is licensed under the BSD 3 Clause License and is Copyright (C) 2013 Ben Tasker