Hello everyone! Stable release 2.8.2 of MistServer is now available! The full changelog is available here and downloads are here. Here is a short summary:

Pro only feature: RTMP output track selection has been added. MistServer can now select the tracks to output by ending the rtmp urls with "?track=track_number" or "?video=track_number" "?audio=track_number".

Pro only feature: HTTPS support has been added, you can activate it through the Protocol panel.

Feature: DTSC pull now allows selection of all buffer parameters.

Improvement: Changed flash protocols priority to RTMP > FLV > HDS. While flash protocols are becoming less common, we have changed the priority to check for the protocols we see used the most.

Improvement: HLS protocol. HLS has become faster and more reliable.

Improvement: Updated Windows (Cygwin-based) builds with IPv6 support

Improvement: Live streaming Live streaming has received various changes for incoming and outgoing live streams, streaming should be more reliable and faster.

Hello everyone!

The previously out of date manual has been updated to the latest release. We've spend a lot effort making sure the manual is both complete as well as easy to follow. We've also added and updated integration documentation (API, Triggers, etc.), so all documentation can now be found in one place.

From this point forward the manual will stay in sync with the releases.

Hello all! Our new stable release 2.7 is out now. We've changed the way our management interface worked and added our new meta-player. The meta player auto-detects the best combination of protocol and player for a given stream and playback device, plus it is fully customizable through CSS for one unified look. We've also updated the MacOS versions to be up to date with our Linux and Windows versions. Downloads are here, and the full changelog is available here. Here is a summary:

Improved MistServer Interface We've changed the MistServer interface significantly. Previews are now accessible only through the stream window as it made more sense to have the stream settings and preview available through the same menu. A first set up for a thumbnail-based menu has been made and included, allowing users to change the way they see their streams within MistServer. The integrated help for stream input is more clear and some other minor interface changes have been done to make everything more convenient to use.

New meta-player and embed code improvements. The new meta-player auto-detects optimal playback methods and is fully customizable through CSS. Several third-party players have also been integrated, making setting them up a breeze (specifically Theoplayer and JWPlayer - more in the future). The meta-player also comes with a DASH player, full support for audio and video track selection, stream looping, subtitles and auto restart/crash recovery functionality.

PRO ONLY: RTSP push input has been added. RTSP push input for both UDP and TCP streams has been added. The default port for RTSP is now 5554, changed from the old default of 554. To use RTSP input, create an push stream exactly like you would for a RTMP push stream, but push towards MistServer using the RTSP port and streamname instead.

PRO ONLY: TS improvements TS is now HBBTV compatible, MistOutTS and MistOutTSStream have been merged to have MistOutTS handle both regular output and push-output. The way to use TS UDP input has been changed to use a new simplified source syntax: "tsudp://IP:PORT[/INTERFACE]".

PRO ONLY: Added "stop sessions" API call. The call can disconnect/stop sessions selectively by stream, connection type, or both.

Added angel process for MistController. An angel process has been added to MistController allowing MistController to fully recover from a crash or other type of unexpected exit, without dropping any connections. This greatly improves reliability for init-based scripts, but also brings support for manually executed rolling updates.

And, as always, plenty general bug fixes and improvements. Again, the full changelog is available here.

We'd like to thank everyone we've met at IBC2016. It's always great to see new and familiar faces and see/show the latest developments. We consider the IBC2016 to have gone great and hope others feel the same way. Until next IBC!

Recently, our CTO Jaron Viëtor has been interviewed by Streaming Media Europe on the latest developments for MistServer. He talks about recently added features, focusing on our load balancer, but also the RTMP/DTSC pull system, Prometheus integration, the use of triggers and more.

The full article can be read here.

Streaming media is a very active and quickly developing area in IT. Because so many technological changes are happening every year, the marketplace changes as well. In order to stay relevant, DDVTech often adjusts their pricing schemes to match current market needs.

At DDVTech we love doing what we do best: creating premium technology for users that know what they want. This means that in principle, MistServer and related services are geared towards enterprise and premium users. However, we noticed that enterprise-level customers often had requests and needs that we did not offer in our standard packages, and other things that we did offer were not very much in demand. As a natural result, we adjusted which packages and services we have in our standard offering.

Enterprise

Our biggest changes in enterprise pricing is that at first we offered two different types of licenses: either per-instance or unlimited. We also made a difference in the ability to redistribute or not. In the new pricing scheme, all enterprise licenses are the same: unlimited instances, with distribution rights while the license is in effect. This comes at a static price, regardless of business size or instances used. We removed all extras from our base package, and now offer these as separate optional items, á la carte-style. We added a few new ones that were often requested as well.

The following packages are available on a monthly basis:

Commercial use license ($2,500 USD monthly; minimum 1 month):

While this package is active, you are allowed to both use and distribute MistServer for commercial purposes. There is no use limit, no instance limit, no other hidden per-server fees of any kind. This package may be used either for the open source edition or the Pro edition, at no additional charge.

Offline use ($2,500 USD monthly; minimum 1 month):

Normally MistServer requires an active internet connection to remain functional. While this package is active, you can both use and distribute MistServer without an active internet connection required.

48h patch service ($1,000 USD monthly; minimum 12 months):

MistServer is extremely robust and rarely has issues. We are so confident of this, that we are willing to guarantee it. For mission-critical use, we offer this package. While active, it guarantees a fix or workaround for any suddenly encountered bugs or issues within 48 hours after notifying us.

Tested appliance ($750 - $500 USD monthly each; minimum 3 months):

For our customers that build appliances (either physical or virtual) that rely on MistServer, we offer this package. While active, you send us your appliance(s) and we test each new MistServer release against your appliance(s) for compatibility problems and other regressions. MistServer generally has a 3 month release interval, hence the 3 month minimum duration. Your first appliance is $750 USD per month, each additional appliance is $500 per month.

Weekly expert call ($500 USD monthly; minimum 1 month):

Our team really knows media, and we are willing to share that knowledge with you. Want to stay up to date on the latest developments? Share your ideas with us? Ask for advice? Want feedback on your platform? While this package is active, you will receive a planned weekly call from one of our engineers, during which you can talk about any of these things and more.

Remote monitoring and assistance ($500 USD monthly per instance; minimum 1 month):

While this package is active, you will receive access to a web panel showing you server vital statistics over time. Additionally, we will actively monitor your server for problems and assist in resolving them if they occur.

Besides the above monthly packages, we also offer these two one-off packages:

Custom development ($200 USD hourly):

Want custom features? Want us to integrate something with MistServer for you? Other MistServer-related programming needs? Of course you can extend MistServer yourself, but with this package you can get the team that knows MistServer best to do custom development for you. This is always done on a per-project basis, at a fixed paid-in-advance price with a fixed deadline. Contact us for details.

Event support ($1250 USD per day per person, plus expenses):

Organising a one-off event? Have a big release coming up? Migrating your entire platform? With this package you can hire the assistance of our engineers on a per-day basis (either on-site or remote), to ensure everything will go smoothly. In the event that anything goes wrong, they will do required patches for you on the spot at no extra cost. Contact us for details.

Special offer for new customers

In the past we have offered free trial periods, but we noticed that the first steps of starting to use MistServer are often confusing for our new users because of how radically different MistServer is. For this reason, we decided to stop our free trial policy and replace it with something else.

Of course we are excited about new projects and new customers. Often a media server is usually a vital part of your platform or solution which means that changing it or replacing it is a risky undertaking. In recognition of this, we have a special offer for new customers.

Usually an integration flows through three phases. In the first phase a proof of concept is made, showing that everything will work. In phase two the integration is completed. In the final phase maintenance and optimizations happen. Especially the first phase can require a lot of manpower: you need to build up expertise, solve the major problems, etcetera. In the second phase it's mostly polish, and in the final phase regular maintenance will ensure your system has no downtime.

To assist in this process, we are willing to co-invest in the first phase. Normally, the commercial use license and most of our optional services for a three month period would cost up to $13.500,00 USD, but new customers get all of this for a one-time fee of $4.500,00 USD. After those three months, you will see your working proof of concept and can decide to continue with MistServer or not, no strings attached.

During this first period we will work closely with you and discover if you will need any custom development (and if so, how much) and what optional services you need, making sure the transition to MistServer is as smooth as possible. Your eventual monthly cost will be somewhere between the above mentioned initial special offer prize and our normal price for all optional services enabled.

Naturally these special offers take a lot of time of our team, and because of this we can only offer it to a limited amount of new customers each month. Please contact us to find out if there are any spots still open and we will give you full details as well as answer any questions you may have.

Hello everyone! Bugfix release 2.6.1 of MistServer is now available! The Raspberry Pi 2 versions have been updated, the MacOS will be available at a later date. Downloads are here, and the full changelog is available here. Here is a summary:

Pro only feature: RTMP output and RTMP push can now (re-)add (new) tracks on the fly.

Pro only improvement: RTMP push outputs no longer fail if streams take longer to initialize, now nulling packet on auto-reconnect to source.

Pro only improvement: Fixed bandwidth statistics sometimes being inaccurate through prometheus-style statistics.

Improvement: Changed default start positions for live streams.Live streams now start at a better (more live) starting position while staying stable, the buffer time has been decreased as well.

Improvement: Better auto-detection on dropped tracks

Improvement: previews will now stay within screen resolutions

Improvement: Speed up for the preview page and embed code

Improvement: MistServer Interface will now correctly show being on the latest version and no longer double-confirms when submitting forms with the return key

Improvement: Fixed a slow loading problem for all outputs.

Hello everyone! Stable release 2.6 of MistServer is now available! It’s taken us quite a while, but we’ve dramatically upgraded the overall efficiency, stability and added several new features. When upgrading to the 2.6 release it is possible you will have to delete any existing DTSH header files for your VoD streams to get the full effect of the efficiency improvements. The 2.6 release is currently only available for Linux and Windows, the OSX version will follow at a later date. Downloads are here, and the full changelog is available here. Here is a summary:

PRO ONLY: MistServer load balancer now available on request. We’re now ready to make our load balancer available on request. This is not exactly our earlier MistSteward project, but only its load balancer as a stand alone binary.

PRO ONLY: Removed limits feature entirely. We’ve removed the limits feature entirely as it has been superseded by the Triggers feature, which is more capable and more flexible.

PRO ONLY: Improved Trigger functionalities. The USER_NEW trigger has been added to trigger on any new unique session. Ater triggering, the same viewer will not trigger again unless there has been no activity for over 10 minutes. Additionally, most other triggers have received stability, accuracy and performance improvements.

PRO ONLY: Added Push functionality, supersedes old recording feature. MistServer is now able to push streams out to an RTMP url, or record to file, both manually and automatically. Recording is now handled by the Push feature, you can set up to record any stream as a TS, MP3 or FLV file.

Added DTSC Pull from other MistServer instances. MistServer is now able to pull from a MistServer Pro instance. You can set this up by setting up the DTSC protocol on your source instance. Afterwards use “dtsc://host:port/stream” as the configured source on the pulling instance to automatically pull on demand from the source instance. Pull input is available in all editions, but pull output is only available in the Pro edition.

PRO ONLY: Added thumbnail-optimized command line option. FLV output can now output latest key frame for streams over command line, to assist with automated thumbnailing.

PRO ONLY: Significant statistics improvements. Added a new feature to MistServer to have Prometheus instrumentation. Additionally, all statistics have been made more accurate. Viewers using segmented protocols will now correctly be seen as one viewer in all cases and connections will not be counted unless at least 128k of data has been received. Sessions are now split over viewer sessions, incoming sessions and outgoing sessions, allowing for accurate human viewer counts. Instrumentation for JSON-style statistics gathering has been added as well. We advise anyone interested in the performance of their streaming platform to use this new feature. You can activate it by running MistServer with the --prometheus or -S command line flag followed by a passphrase to access the statistics on.

Recovery improvements. MistServer could sometimes leave behind leaked memory and/or locked semaphores. These problems have now been solved and MistServer can now recover from all types of crashes automatically.

Added resume support flag to the Open Source version. Resume support as a flag for live streams is now available in the open source version as well. The default is now not to allow resuming streams and instead assume all incoming streams are new, allowing for much more reliable re-pushing behaviour upon lost connections.

Lowered the priority of the HDS protocol in the embed code. We’ve lowered the priority of the HDS protocol to be lower than RTMP, in order to improve end-user experience.

General output improvements. Various time-outs have been improved giving better performance at higher loads and streams starting before the buffer is ready will now wait for the buffer to fill instead of aborting.

RTMP improvements. A long-duration input timing issue has been fixed, RTMP is now able to url-unescape playback paths (fixing XSplit compatibility). The incoming RTMP live stream negotiation has been sped up and dropped tracks due to inactivity can now be resumed. RTMP and FLV inputs are now able to (re)create missing initialization data.

IPv6 compatibility fixes. Use of IPv6 addresses without hostnames had various problems that have now been corrected.

RTSP timestamp correction. The real-time-clock of RTSP is now accurate.

Several improvements for MP4 file input. MP4 header generation has been sped up significantly. MP4 file inputs now handle negative frame offsets and will calculate correct video resolution in all cases. Seeking on MP4 input streams should see better results as well. Improved the compatibility for Firefox playback as well.

Several improvements for TS inputs. Both TS live and VoD input have received significant improvements in terms of speed and stability.

Improvements to DASH streaming. DASH streams should now be compatible with any DASH player available.

Stability improvements for HLS streaming. Improved the stability for HLS streams, and will now work better on all devices/players.

Hello everyone!

We'll be attending FOSDEM2016 again, this year like last year we'll be responsible for the video streaming of the event itself. We've made many improvements since last year and we'll expect followers will be pleasantly surprised once they see what we've been up to.

If you'd like to talk to us feel free to poke one of the people wearing a green (video) FOSDEM shirt, you'll most likely be talking to one of us.