Nimble Streamer and Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)
Overview of Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and Nimble Streamer
Nimble Streamer is a comprehensive and efficient solution for RTMP streaming. It can handle incoming RTMP streams, making it possible to re-publish, re-use, and play them back using any player, encoder, or server software. Additionally, Nimble Streamer supports RTMP over SSL (RTMPS) for secure transmission in all supported modes. Also, enhanced interleaving compensation can be set up in case when your audio and video are unsynchronized.
Nimble Streamer also offers a variety of codec options for video and audio, including H.264, VP6, AAC, MP3, and Speex, with HEVC/H.265 being non-standard experimental feature.
Please read more about supported codecs.
More About Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and Nimble Streamer
Farewell to Flash
Before diving into the wide ranging Nimble Streamer RTMP feature set, please take a look at our Get ready for Flash farewell and RTMP decline article about future discontinuity of Flash support by Adobe in 2020.
We describe the need for transitioning from RTMP to other technologies for playback purposes and we propose SLDP as an alternative.
However, RTMP is still a powerful tool for a lot of use cases. Please take a look below at what we provide.
DVR Recording
Nimble Streamer DVR feature set allows you to record incoming RTMP live streams for further playback via HLS and MPEG-DASH.
Pull by Request
Nimble Streamer can create RTMP and HLS streams by request from pulled RTMP sources in case you have streams which you don't want to pull 24/7.
This is helpful when you have many stations or cameras which are not required to be transmuxed all the time.
Republishing
You can set up RTMP republishing for incoming published and pulled streams. With that being set up, you can bring live streams to edge servers for further usage like transmuxing.
You can build live streaming networks with various origins and edges connected via RTMP as well as other supported protocols. Notice that you may add and remove republishing rules via WMSPanel API as well as via Nimble Streamer native API in addition to WMSPanel web UI.
With that capability you can re-stream your content in the following use cases:
Re-package into other live protocols
Same transmuxing engine allows re-packaging RTMP content into the following protocols.
Server-Side Ads Insertion for RTMP
Nimble Advertizer supports server-side ads insertion for RTMP live streams. This allows users to insert advertising into RTMP streams, regardless of the viewer's platform and player, and implement custom business logic for pre-roll and mid-roll with user-specific insertion.
Visit Advertizer page for technical specs and other details.
Hot Swap
Hot swap capabilities allow switching between source origin and substitute streams with no glitches or artifacts:
API and Control
There are several ways to control RTMP streaming with Nimble Streamer, including the WMSPanel web UI, a publish control framework, a stream availability push API, and a set of WMSPanel and Nimble native APIs.
- RTSP publish control allows to secure your ingest points from unwanted streams. It has several levels of control including custom handler web app to apply your business logic to your broadcasting process. This is a must-have feature for mobile broadcasting.
Pleaseread this overview article to learn more about benefits of publish control framework and check the detailed setup description to see it in action. - Stream availability push API allows getting notifications about RTSP streams publishing and unpublishing.
- Set of WMSPanel APIs allows controlling RTSP settings.
- Set of Nimble native APIs allows getting RTMP streams status and performing some control activities.
Aliasing
Stream aliases are available for making flexible security settings and statistics.