Stream video from object store on Jetstream

In this tutorial we will serve video stored in Jetstream’s object store (like Amazon S3) as HTTP live streaming to a user’ browser. This makes it difficult for the user to save the whole video as it is served in chunks.

Load a test video on object store

Go to Project > Object store

Create a container, for example videostream, make it public

Upload a test video, for example:

https://test-videos.co.uk/vids/bigbuckbunny/mp4/h264/720/Big_Buck_Bunny_720_10s_30MB.mp4

Wait 5 minutes then test you can access the video from your machine and note the base url.

Deploy the VM

Configure SSL

The streaming server will ask for the SSL certificates on setup.

So, install certbot with:

sudo apt install certbot

and get certificates:

certbot certonly --standalone -d js-xxx-yyy.jetstream-cloud.org

Install the streaming server

Kaltura maintains packages for Ubuntu, so it is easy to install it following https://github.com/kaltura/nginx-vod-module#debianubuntu-deb-package

For the configuration interactive prompts (I might have set them out of order here):

Use port 80 instead of 88 (unless you plan to have another NGINX instance on port 80)
Use port 443 instead of 8443
For the mode choose “Remote”, we will load from object store
For the remote url set the base url of the object store (before /swift) and the port
Say “No” when it asks if you use the Kaltura media service
For SSL certificate set /etc/letsencrypt/live/js-xxx-yyy.jetstream-cloud.org/fullchain.pem
For SSL key set /etc/letsencrypt/live/js-xxx-yyy.jetstream-cloud.org/privkey.pem

By default it sets the streaming from HTTP instead of HTTPS, so edit /opt/kaltura/nginx/conf/vod-remote.conf, modify:

proxy_pass http://media/$1;

into:

proxy_pass https://media/$1;

If anything goes wrong in the configuration, check the error log at:

/opt/kaltura/log/nginx/

and reset it:

sudo apt purge kaltura-nginx
rm -fr /opt/kaltura
sudo apt install kaltura-nginx

Test the streaming

First try to access the stream directly from your browser, browsers don’t know how to display a HLS stream, but if you get to download a file named “index.m3u8” that is a good sign:

https://js-xxx-yyy.jetstream-cloud.org/hls/swift/v1/videostream/Big_Buck_Bunny_720_10s_30MB/index.m3u8

In the URL, videostream is the name of the bucket (container), then the filename, index.m3u8 tells the server that we want to stream that into HLS format.

If you get an error message instead, check the Kaltura NGINX logs.

Finally we can test it into a player, for example VideoJS, go to https://videojs-http-streaming.netlify.app/ and paste the URL of your stream.