IP Video Broadcasting Live! (abbreviation IPVBL) is a real time IP media stream broadcasting server program that can can be run on both Win32 and Linux platforms with high performance. IPVBL works as a media streaming server of PUSHING mode. It can stream media files to user specified network addresses through RTP (IETF standards RFC 2190, RFC 2429, RFC 3984, etc), MPEG-2 PS (program stream) and TS (transport stream) formats.

Compare to other general media streaing servers, IPVBL has a special talent of streaming while transcoding on the fly. With its powerful transcoding capability between bulk of audio and video encodings, such as G.711(PCM), MP2/3, AMR-NB, AAC, H.263(+), H.264 and MPEG-4, IPVBL can stream from most of the file formats you can find from the internet.

IPVBL can even restream video from most familiar media servers of 3rd party from the internet, including HTTP servers, RTSP servers (RealNetworks Helix Server) and RTMP servers (Adobe Flash Media Server). This enables you *pull* and restream either recorded or live video from your favorite video websites like Youtube.

Specification

• Audio Files: PCM, WAV, MP3, AMR, ASF, VOC, OGG, AU, etc.
• Video Files: AVI, MPG, MP4, MOV, MKV, WMV, 3GP, DVD/VOB, FLV, SWF, RM, RMVB, etc.
• Image Files: BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, etc.
• HTTP Server
• RTSP Server
• RTMP Server

• RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol) RFC 3550, RFC 2190, RFC 2429, RFC 4629, RFC 3984, RFC 3016
• MPEG-2 PS (Program Stream)
• MPEG-2 TS (Transport Stream)
• RTMP Up-streaming

• SQCIF (128x96)
• QCIF (176x144)
• CIF (352x288)
• 4CIF (704x576)
• QVGA (320x240)
• VGA (640x480)
• Custom/User-specified (H.263+/H.264/MPEG-4)

• Processor: 2GHz or higher (The higher the better. Multi-core CPU recommended.)
• RAM: 1GB or above
• Ethernet NIC
• OS: Microsoft Windows® 2000/XP/Vista/2003 Server or Linux on kernel 2.4/2.6

Getting Started

To setup a broadcasting task in IPVBL, only a few steps are needed to go. First, click Create Channel. This will create a new broadcasting channel with default settings. Next, select media source in the task list. If you are streaming from a media file on disk, just enter the full path of the file or click "..." button to browse for it. If you are streaming from some network media server, make sure to select the right streaming protocol (HTTP/RTSP/RTMP) that the server use. And enter the url of the media source. For example:

http://www.someserver.com/demo.avi
rtmp://12.34.56.78/vod/sample

Then change transcoding settings of the output stream according to your needs, such as streaming format (RTP/MPEG-TS/MPEG-PS), streaming address, stream encoding, etc. Settings like video frame resolution, frame rate, quality level, encoding bitrate, audio sample rate give you precise controlling of characteristics to the output stream.

Notes:

• Multicast IP address (Class D IP address) is valid for target address.
• Audio address is NOT used for MPEG-TS or PS streams even with audio. Only video address is.
• RTP Payload Type is needed to be configured only if streaming in RTP format.

For RTP formats, you may import and export stream attributes in SDP formatted (See IETF RFC 2327) files by clicking Import SDP and Export SDP buttons. That makes configuration much easier. SDP is a universal method to describe media streams in RTP format. It is widely used together with other multimedia transporting protocols such as SIP and RTSP. Many network stream media players like VLC and QuickTime support SDP file playback.

Once you've finished with the settings, click Apply button to save and validate your configuration. Or you can click Cancel to abort modifying this time. You can always change the broadcasting settings by clicking Edit button at a later time. But remember doing this when the broadcasting channel IS NOT running.

After a new broadcasting channel is created, an entry with the task briefing will be displayed in the broadcating task list. The red light () in the last column indicates the channel is not started yet. Click Start Channel button to start broadcasting. If everything is OK, the status light will switch to green (), which means the channel is running good now.

Validating

After a broadcasting channel is started, you can validate the output stream by using some network traffic monitors such as
Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org). More directly, you can play the stream using network media players like
VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) mentioned above. For RTP streams, feed the player with the SDP file exported from IPVBL. For MPEG-TS/PS streams, just open the network address that transcoding targets. If everything is OK, you should be able to watch live video in the player then. (Due to network cache values set in VLC player, there could be playback latency while watching.)

Advanced Settings

• Enable RTCP
  Enable RTCP receiver reports (RR) and sender reports (SR) for RTP stream.

• Quality Level
  Output video picture quality value from 1 to 100. The higher the better quality is. An "Original" string value indicates the same quality as input. A better quality also results in a higher encoding bit rate. So DO NOT set this value and Bandwidth at the same time.

• Bandwidth
  Video encoding bit rate in Kbps. Note that low encoding bit rate also results in low video quality. So DO NOT set this value and Quality Level at the same time.

• Global Header
  For MPEG-4 and H.264 RTP streams, changing this value to Out of Band will remove global header string in encoded frames from the stream, which can save some bandwidth. Instead, the string is exported into SDP files.

• Threads
  Specify how many threads are to be used in broadcasting. This setting can be used to adjust broadcasting performance.

Troubleshooting

• Broadcasting starts and stops immediately (Status light quickly switched back to red from green), why's that?
  Broadcasting started failed. Please check and make sure the media source is OK. If the media source comes from a network media server, make sure the URL is available.

  Make sure the output streams are enabled correctly. For example, DO NOT enable audio streaming if the media source does not contain an audio stream.

• Broadcasting starts OK. But I can't see video output in VLC.
  Make sure VLC is running exactly on the broadcasting target address and is receiving stream output from IPVBL. Use Wireshark if necessary. Open message log in VLC (Tools->Messages) and set log level to max to see full logs. If you are broadcasting video stream in H.263, remember VLC DOES NOT support H.263 RTP stream playing (only H.263+).

  If still no video outputting, please enable file logging in IPVBL and send the log file back to us (support#ipvideotrans.com) for investigation. To enable file logging, open configuration file of IPVBL (named <ipvbl.conf> in the program directory) and add a line "log 1" into it. Then save the file and restart IPVBL to start broadcasting again. The log file (named <ipvt_###.log>) will be created automatically.