VODServer Usage

VODServer can be invoked using a URL like http://vodserver:port/service name?service parameters. VODServer bundles several predefined services, following are example invocations:

  • http://vodserver:port/channel?id=name

    The channel service allows you to define a static mapping of channel names to service invocations. Please see the Channels page for information on configuring your own channels. Using channels instead of a direct service invocation provides several advantages:

    • Clients can use a simple URL; they don't need to know which service to use for a specific channel and what service request parameters to use; they only need to specify a simple channel name/id.
    • Channels are administered in a central place; if for example you want to use a different service or different service parameters to view a specific channel, this only needs to be updated in the VODServer configuration. Clients will not see this change because they are simply pointing to the predefined channel name.
  • http://vodserver:port/play?input=d:\videos\myvideo.mp4

    Play a local video

  • http://vodserver:port/play?input=rtsp://somesite/someRtspStream

    Play a remote video by providing the direct video stream URL. The video stream URL must be supported by ffmpeg as input URL. This means that for mms-streams, you will need to use the mmsh:// prefix. See the ffmpeg documentation for more information about supported URL types.

  • http://vodserver:port/playRtmp?rtmpStreamer=...&rtmpApp=...&rtmpFlashVer=...&rtmpFlashPlayer=...&rtmpPageUrl=...&rtmpFile=...

    Play a video using the given RTMP parameters. Every parameter is optional, although of course you need to supply the correct set of parameters for a given video stream. These parameters are passed directly to rtmpdump to load the video stream. Please see the rtmpdump documentation for more information.

  • http://vodserver:port/playFromPage?url=http://somehost/link/to/page/containing/video

    This will parse the contents of http://somehost/link/to/page/containing/video, trying to find a video stream. For example, it will try to extract rtsp, mms or rtmp-based video streams.

  • http://vodserver:port/ilive?url=http://www.ilive.to/view/...

    Special service for the site iLive.to

  • http://vodserver:port/kanalia?url=http://www.kanalia.eu/player/player.php?channel=...

    Special service for the site kanalia.eu

  • http://vodserver:port/test

    Plays a short video showing 'Welcome to VODServer' for testing purposes

  • http://vodserver:port/shutdown?confirm=12345

    Shut down VODServer. The confirmation value (for security purposes) can be configured in vodserver-service-shutdown.xml

Logging

By default, VODServer performs only limited logging. You can however get detailed logs for specific service invocations by including the debug=1 request parameter in your VODServer request. For example: http://vodserver:port/service?debug=1&input=... For each request that includes this parameter, two new log files will be created. One log file contains the details while executing the request, whereas the other log file contains the command output (assuming there were no errors while executing the parameter builders or the command).

You can also configure VODServer to perform detailed logging for all requests by setting a system property on start-up:

java -Ddebug=1 -jar VODServer.jar

Please note that detailed logs can grow quite large, and the detailed logs will not be automatically cleaned up. As such, using detailed logging is not recommended for production use.