Question

It appears that ffmpeg now has a segmenter in it, or at least there is a command line option

-f segment

in the documentation.

Does this mean I can use ffmpeg to realtime-transcode a video into h.264 and deliver segmented IOS compatible .m3u8 streams using ffmpeg alone? if so, what would a command to transcode an arbitrary video file to a segmented h.264 aac 640 x 480 stream ios compatible stream?

Answer 1

Absolutely – you can use -f segment to chop video into pieces and serve it to iOS devices. ffmpeg will create segment files .ts and you can serve those with any web server.

Working example (with disabled sound) – ffmpeg version N-39494-g41a097a:

./ffmpeg -v 9 -loglevel 99 -re -i sourcefile.avi -an \
-c:v libx264 -b:v 128k -vpre ipod320 \ 
-flags -global_header -map 0 -f segment -segment_time 4 \
-segment_list test.m3u8 -segment_format mpegts stream%05d.ts

Tips:

• make sure you compile ffmpeg from most recent git repository
• compile with libx264 codec
• -map 0 is needed

How I compiled FFMPEG – with extra rtmp support to get feeds from flash-media-server

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib/pkgconfig/:../rtmpdump-2.3/librtmp"    

./configure --enable-librtmp --enable-libx264 \
--libdir='../x264/:/usr/local/lib:../rtmpdump-2.3' \
--enable-gpl --enable-pthreads --enable-libvpx \
--disable-ffplay --disable-ffserver --disable-shared --enable-debug