HTML5 live broadcasting

Question

Adobe Flash uses Adobe Flash Player, RTMP protocol, Flash Media Server and Flash Media Live Encoder to make live broadcasting possible..

What protocol and software corresponds to HTML video/audio ?

What can replace RTMP protocol, Flash Media Server and Flash Media Live Encoder?

Is it possible with HTML5?

Solution 1

Wowza is currently working on their Media Server, which will support HTML5. You can view it here, it's playing a movie last I checked.

It uses WebM, which is a project dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. It's based on a Matroska container. It's currently in use by YouTube to play HTML5 video.

The source of this stream is a WebM file that is streamed as a live stream using the Wowza server-side publishing API.

According to the tag note:

Note: A browser that supports HTML5, WebM, VP8 and Ogg Vorbis is required. Works with the following browsers:

So these appear to be the requirements to get a web browser to live stream.

Solution 2

HTML5 is an extension of HTML4, and as such works using any tcp/ip port as specified in the src parameter of the video tag. It is handled directly by the browser, not using any plugin such as Flash, and is therefore the only existing streaming solution for mobile devices.

HTML5 video is protocol agnostic - the protocol is implied by the source URL, as for example in :

<video src="rtp://myserver.com/path/to/stream">
    Your browser does not support the VIDEO tag and/or RTP streams.
</video>

or maybe :

<video src="http://myserver.com:1935/path/to/stream/myPlaylist.m3u8">
    Your browser does not support the VIDEO tag and/or RTP streams.
</video>

This all depends on the browser's support for the protocol that is used. Simply streaming a video file is normally always supported, but more complicated cases as above may require the use of a plugin when the browser lacks the required support.

HTML5 players can be built using as tools only HTML, CSS and Javascript.

An example is VideoJS, a free & open source lightweight player that is 100% skinnable using CSS, whose website also contains lots of useful information about HTML5 video.

Much more information is available around the Kaltura project, which is best accessed starting with html5video - A Kaltura community site. This site also contains an HTML5 Player Comparison and the article Getting Started - Navigating HTML5

To publish an existing video file on HTML5, one can use the free Html5 Video Creator which creates the HTML5 code for you.

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Related StackOverflow question: stackoverflow.com/questions/1735933/…