With TrueTime MultiView™ for Production, create custom displays of live streams. Switch between feeds, rely on full synchronization, and enjoy sub-400ms latency.
This is a low-latency video mixer that runs on a server, creating a dynamic combined output stream for viewers from many live input streams.
The mixer consists of three parts. The BrewMixer WebApp serves a RESTful front end to create, modify, and destroy mixers. This is backed by the NodeMixer Plugin which makes up the service layer, interacting with the Red5Pro server to create and route stream data. And finally, the Native layer where low-level data operations occur.
User applications control the mixer using a graph-based "RenderTree", which allows modular video positioning and sizing as well as an audio mixing graph controlling the volume and panning of various sources.
The BrewMixer webapp serves the RESTful BrewMixer API. Source code is provided as an example so that users can learn how to interact directly with the mixer using their own custom webapps, effectively bypassing or reimplementing the BrewMixer API.
The WebApp also includes an example controller page, renderTreeController.html, which shows how to construct a RenderTree in JavaScript and make calls through the REST API. The page also allows users to edit the JSON RenderTree by hand to submit to the server, for easy experimentation.
The NodeMixer Plugin is a Red5Pro Plugin making up the service layer. It handles the interaction with Red5Pro internals to begin Brew decoding of incoming streams and to coordinate the native layer with the outbound encoder, providing raw video and audio data.
The native layer performs the low-level tasks of compositing video and mixing audio. It uses OpenCV for CPU-based image compositing.
BrewMixer API documentation can be found separately.
Install on a standalone RedPro server using Ubuntu 22.04.
In the red5pro/extras/ directory, find the brewmixer/ folder. Find the node-mixer-standalone-deploy.sh script. Execute this script from within red5pro/extras/brewmixer (as present working directory).
This script installs the BrewMixer components and also performs some basic configuration steps. When the script has finished, restart your Red5Pro server (e.g., with sudo systemctl restart red5pro).
Installation is complete.
The install script performed several steps, explained here. If you just wish to try out the mixer, skip ahead to How to Test below.
The plugin JAR is copied to red5pro/plugins/, and the native components are unzipped into red5pro/plugins/nodemixer/.
The red5pro/brewmixer/brewmixer/ folder (an exploded WAR) is copied into red5pro/webapps/.
The script removes the Stream Manager webapp and configures the cluster node type to off, disabling the Cluster Plugin. This prevents some irrelevant errors and using the off cluster node type rather than auto prevents certain cluster-only operations from occuring (and disables digest security in the BrewMixer API).
Assuming you have installed on localhost, navigate to http://localhost:5080/brewmixer/renderTreeController.html
Note this HTTP connection and unsecure port 5080, otherwise the page mixes unsecure content.
Information about using the RenderTree Controller can be found in its own document.