HLS Streaming using node JS

Tirtha picture Tirtha · Feb 19, 2014 · Viewed 20k times · Source

I'm trying to stream HLS content using node.js. And somehow it is not working. It'll be of great help if someone helps me out.

Problem:- Trying to serve HLS content from node.js (not live stream, but a set of .ts files and .m3u8 playlist, or in other words VOD content)

Folder Structure

stream_test
|--- app.js
|--- node_modules
|--- streamcontent
        |--- test.m3u8
        |--- segment0.ts
        |--- segment1.ts
        .
        .
        .
        |--- segment127.ts

My app.js looks like this

var http = require('http'),
    url = require('url'),
    path = require('path'),
    fs = require('fs');
var mimeTypes = {
    "html": "text/html",
    "jpeg": "image/jpeg",
    "jpg": "image/jpeg",
    "png": "image/png",
    "js": "text/javascript",
    "css": "text/css",
    "ts": "video/MP2T",
    "m3u8": "application/vnd.apple.mpegurl"};

http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    var uri = url.parse(req.url).pathname;
    var filename = path.join(process.cwd(), unescape(uri));
    var stats;

    console.log('filename '+filename);

    try {
        stats = fs.lstatSync(filename); // throws if path doesn't exist
    } catch (e) {
        res.writeHead(404, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
        res.write('404 Not Found\n');
        res.end();
        return;
    }


    if (stats.isFile()) {
        // path exists, is a file
        var mimeType = mimeTypes[path.extname(filename).split(".")[1]];
        res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': mimeType} );

        var fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filename);
        fileStream.pipe(res);
    } else if (stats.isDirectory()) {
        // path exists, is a directory
        res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
        res.write('Index of '+uri+'\n');
        res.write('TODO, show index?\n');
        res.end();
    } else {
        // Symbolic link, other?
        // TODO: follow symlinks?  security?
        res.writeHead(500, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
        res.write('500 Internal server error\n');
        res.end();
    }

}).listen(8000);

The test.m3u8 looks like this

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:0
#EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE:YES
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:19
#EXT-X-PLAYLIST-TYPE:VOD
#EXTINF:12.595922,
segment0.ts
.
.
.

I used ffmpeg to create the segments and palylist

ffmpeg -i video-a.mp4  -c:a libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k  -c:v libx264   -b:v 128k -flags -global_header -map 0 -f segment  -segment_list test.m3u8 -segment_time 30 -segment_format mpegts segment_%05d.ts

Test Scenraio:- Works fine if served from Apache, does not if served from node.

Test Tool:- VNC Player

Answer

Tirtha picture Tirtha · Feb 20, 2014

With the idea from Brad, I was able to do this using express.static. Here goes the solution.

The app.js is changed like this

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var path = require('path');

app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname,'streamcontent')));

app.listen(8000);
console.log('Listening on Port 8000');

and the .m3u8 playlist changed to this

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:0
#EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE:YES
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:19
#EXT-X-PLAYLIST-TYPE:VOD
#EXTINF:12.595922,
http://localhost:8000/segment0.ts
#EXTINF:10.135133,
http://localhost:8000/segment1.ts
#EXTINF:11.511511,
http://localhost:8000/segment2.ts

And thats it. Voila !!!