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Server for movie streaming
I have a plan, to provide movie streaming to paid users. Nothing illegal, will be doing in partnership with local film producers. Have already planned out the application/software side of things, but need some help in what kind of hardware/network I'd be needing.
Need something that can handle a maximum of about 40 users watching a movie (HD/720p quality) at a time.
Am guessing a normal xeon quad processor or even a VPS will do the job. What I don't know is, what kind of network bandwidth it would require.
Comments
Non-HD movie is usually 2-3 Mbps per person. HD is 10Mbps or more.
By the way, film distribution rights are usually limited to a certain country. So you should probably seek for a server in the same country as your watchers.
What quality are you encoding the videos at in terms of kbps?
Will you be doing transcoding on the server, or uploading a finished product?
How many simultaneous viewers do you expect at any given time?
Hi, we have dual L5520 Intel Xeon 24GB of RAM 1TB HDD starting @ $49/month https://www.cloudshards.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=128
This is in Dallas, Texas, USA. This would help if as others said you need to do processing on the CPU.
SD 1mbps 576p h264 - HD less than 4mbps 1080p h264
Doesn't HD (1080p) quality have some encoding bitrate? I don't know what it is. I won't be encoding the movies. I'll have the movies in probably .flv format and upload it to the server. Not gonna do encoding on the server. But the size of the movies should be 1-2 per movie. Not gonna be my headache to encode the movies, but would be good to know. Only job is to code up a billing/user management and access rights.
20-40 simultaneous users.
Thanks. Don't need it right now, but will keep that in mind. Hopefully it'll be still available or something similar later on. Will need time to start working on the application.
As far as rights go, there isn't much where I am. Will be working with those small producers directly, so I don't think any rights issue will arise after all they own the rights to their movies.
There's no minimum bitrate for video and if you're not encoding the videos then you don't have to worry about choosing it, but you need to know what the average bitrate for the videos you're hosting will be so you can choose a webhost appropriately and plan for traffic spikes.
40 people watching a 5Mbit video = you'd want 200Mbps.
Do you plan to target mobile devices as well? If so, you'll want to use a media segmenter to chop those FLV files into HLS segments for viewing on Android and iOS.
Just take (number viewers)x(max bit rate). I've done some small streaming with friends and using rtmp and it never really impacted the CPU so a standees vps would work fine. For 40 veiwers a 100 mbps would mean about 2mbps per veiwer, and for hd to look kinda good I would want more then that. Look for some of the 1 gbps providers.
Also 40 people * 5 Mbps will use about 1 TB for every 11-12 hours of streaming. Not sure if @fliphost still offers 31 TB on its storage vps with an 1 gbps upgrade, they might be an option.
@PcJamesy
Thanks for the recommendation. Though for this type of streaming we would prefer a dedicated server such that @concerto49 mentioned, which we offer as well.
Dont use flv, use x264
20 - 40 users can be handled with 100 mbps port.
1st thing that you should know is what kind of input stream do you have.
As i said before 576p h264 with variable bit rate can be around 1mbps
1080p variable bit rate h264 can be near 4 mbps.
Stream weight is same in every transport envelope. flv stream or hls or rstp would be near same in size +- headers.
If you have any questions regarding streaming, fell free to contact me via pm. I would be glad to assist you if i can.