Open Visual Cloud CDN Transcode Sample

The CDN Transcode Sample is an Open Visual Cloud software stack with all required open source ingredients well integrated to provide out-of-box simple transcode or transcode+CDN service, including live streaming and video on demand. It also provides Docker-based media delivery software development environment upon which developer can easily build their specific applications.

Architecture

The sample implements a reference server-side transcode system over CDN infrastructure, which features live streaming and VOD. Among them, the VOD service can run independently to provide a simple transcode service.

Software Stacks

The sample is powered by the following Open Visual Cloud software stacks:

• Media transcoding software stack:

The FFmpeg-based media transcoding stack is used to transcode media content from a higher resolution/quality to a lower resolution/quality. The software stack is optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel XeonE3 Scalable Processors.

• Media streaming and Web Hosting software stack:

The NGINX-based software stack is used to host web services, video content and provide video streaming services. The software stack is optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.

Install Prerequisites:

• Time Zone: Check that the timezone setting of your host machine is correctly configured. Timezone is used during build. If you plan to run the sample on a cluster of machines, please make sure to synchronize time among the controller node and worker nodes.

• Build Tools: Install cmake, make, m4, wget and gawk if they are not available on your system.

• Docker Engine:

  • Install docker engine. Minimum version required: 17.05. Make sure you setup docker to run as a regular user.
  • Setup Kubernetes. See Kubernetes Setup for additional setup details.
  • Setup docker proxy as follows if you are behind a firewall:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d       
printf "[Service]\nEnvironment=\"HTTPS_PROXY=$https_proxy\" \"NO_PROXY=$no_proxy\"\n" | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/proxy.conf       
sudo systemctl daemon-reload          
sudo systemctl restart docker     

Build the Sample

Run the following command to run the sample as a simple transcoder:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Run the following command to run the sample as transcode+CDN:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DSCENARIO=cdn ..
make

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If you deploy the sample to a cluster, please configure the sample, as cmake -DREGISTRY=<registry-url> .., to push the sample images to the private docker registry after each build.

To deploy without a private registry, run make update after each build to push the sample images to the cluster nodes (which requires passwordless access from the master node to the worker nodes.)

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Deploy the Sample

Start/stop the sample with Kubernetes yaml configurations:

make volume
make start_kubernetes
...
make stop_kubernetes

Start/stop the sample with Kubernetes Helm charts:

make volume
make start_helm
...
make stop_helm

For the transcode scenario, look at the logs of the benchmark pod for the batch transcoding summary. For the cdn scenario, point your browser to https://<your-host> to watch the list of video clips via DASH or HLS.

See Also

• Kubernetes Setup
• Build Options
• Reference Architecture