i'm receiving a HLS/AppleHTTP stream with FFmpeg. The source stream looks like:
Input #0, hls,applehttp, from 'http://example.com/hls/index.m3u8':
Duration: 00:00:00.09, start: 42870.540944, bitrate: 91 kb/s
Program 0
Metadata:
variant_bitrate : 0
Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (High) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p, 1024x576 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 12.50 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0:1: Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 114 kb/s
Stream #0:2: Unknown: none ([21][0][0][0] / 0x0015)
I need to forward this kind of stream with FFmpeg to a Stream Server. My problem is, how to do it with FFmpeg without encoding and have high CPU usage (i think -video copy -audio copy). Second, which Streaming Server Software is the best (low cpu usage) to recieve the stream and send it to the users as HLS stream?
HLS stands for HTTP Live Streaming. You don't need a special server to send it to the clients, just a regular web server like Nginx (one of your tags).
You can do:
ffmpeg -i http://example.com/hls/index.m3u8 -c copy /path/to/web/dir/index.m3u8
The command will create the playlist and copy the segments to /path/to/web/dir which is located in the web server's document root. The clients only need the new URL.
Things will get more complicated if the input playlist is a master playlist containing multiple variant streams. In this case you need to capture all individual streams to different directories and write a new master playlist on your side to regroup the different streams.