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 We’ve removed the limits feature entirely as it has been superseded by the Triggers feature, which is more capable and more flexible.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