smartjog / savate

An experimental live audio/video HTTP streaming server

savate

savate is an experimental live audio/video HTTP streaming server.

License

savate is available under the AGPL3+ license.

© 2011-2012 Nicolas Noirbent

© 2011-2012 SmartJog S.A.S.

Build and installation

Bootstrapping

savate uses the autotools for its build system.

If you checked out code from the git repository, you will need autoconf and automake to generate the configure script and Makefiles.

To generate them, simply run:

$ autoreconf -fvi

Building

If building from the git repository, you will need Cython. To build the manpages, you will also need the rst2man utility, usually found in the python-docutils package. Otherwise you can obtain it from http://docutils.sourceforge.net/.

You need to be able to build Python extensions to build savate. On most distributions this means installing the python-dev or python-devel package.

savate builds like your typical autotools-based project:

$ ./configure && make && make install

Runtime

You will need Python >= 2.6 and cyhttp11 to run savate.

Development

We use semantic versioning for versioning. When working on a development release, we append ~dev to the current version to distinguish released versions from development ones. This has the advantage of working well with Debian's version scheme, where ~ is considered smaller than everything (so version 1.10.0 is more up to date than 1.10.0~dev).

TODO

• savate currently uses an homemade epoll-based I/O event loop. While it does the job, it is (obviously) lacking some nice features from a dedicated event loop (most notably timers and a wider platform support). pyev looks like a good fit. tornado looks very close in terms of API, and would apparently not forbid us to go with edge-triggered operation, so it may well be a better short-term solution; it may also give us access to other tornado-based projects (see https://github.com/facebook/tornado/wiki/Links)
• Smarter dead/slow clients detection. Instead of I/O starvation ("x milliseconds without I/O"), check for clients that are too late wrt the live stream.
• True HTTP/1.1; first and foremost, chunked transfer-encoding support for sources.
• Free/open formats support: Ogg/Vorbis/Theora/WebM.
• Raw AAC support. Note that savate already supports AAC-only FLV streams.
• File fallback on source takedown / failure.
• On-demand relaying.
• Master / slave operation, where a slave savate instance will re-stream its master(s)'s streams.
• Multi-process / multi-thread operation.