Review: AirenSoft OvenMediaEngine

This review will highlight OvenMedia­Engine, the open-source streaming ser­ver from AirenSoft, and explore its fea­tures for providing sub-­second latency for live streaming. The article will also touch on OvenMediaEngine’s options for LL-­HLS and WebRTC. Finally, we’ll dive into testing SRT and RTMP ingest options.

About OvenMediaEngine (Enterprise Edition)

OvenMediaEngine is a fully featured open source streaming server that can provide HD live streams over WebRTC and LL­-HLS with sub-­second latency. It is capable of ingesting live streams over the following protocols: WHIP, SRT, RTMP, RTSP, and MPEG-2-­TS. Additional­ly, users can encode to adaptive bitrates (ABRs) with the embedded live transcoder and stream to viewers over LL-­HLS and WebRTC.

Setting Up OvenMediaEngine

There are two ways to access and run Oven­ MediaEngine: You can download the Oven­ MediaEngine source code and build it your­self, or you can install it with Docker.

I used the OME Docker Launcher to set up OvenMediaEngine for this review. To do this, you’ll need to be comfortable with Bash scripting via the command-line interface and starting EC2 instances with Amazon Web Services (AWS). You’ll also need a ba­sic understanding of using AWS. For those who are not familiar with Docker, OME Docker Launcher makes things a breeze, because AirenSoft provides all of the com­mands you’ll need to run in the command­line interface.

To get started with using Oven­ MediaEngine, first you need to subscribe to EC2. Then, you can launch an instance for Oven­ MediaEngine on AWS. The follow­ ing steps will guide you through the setup process using the OME Docker Launcher.

First, click Launch Instance, and give your instance a name. As you can see in Figure 1, I named mine OME­TEST. Then, choose an Amazon Linux AMI. For my testing in this review, I used Amazon Linux 2023. For instance type, you can use a T2.micro just for testing purpos­es. Next, set up a key pair to use, and configure the network settings for your security group.

Figure 1. Setting up OvenMediaEngine

Table 1 shows the ports used by OvenMedia­ Engine. These are ports I opened on my EC2 instance in the security group. You’ll need to have these ports open on the server.

Table 1. OvenMediaEngine ports

Installing Docker and OvenMediaEngine

Here are the steps to install OvenMedia­ Engine:

1. Connect to your EC2 instance using SSH
2. Once connected over SSH, install Docker using the following:

$ sudo yum install docker -y

3. Next, test Docker to confirm it installed properly using this statement:

$ sudo service docker start

4. Then, to install OvenMediaEngine using the Docker Launcher, run the following command in your Linux shell:

curl -OL 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ AirenSoft/OvenMediaEngine/master/misc/ome_docker_launcher.sh' && chmod +x ome_docker_launcher.sh

5. Run the following to display the Oven­ MediaEngine dashboard screen:

./ome_docker_launcher.sh -h

6. Follow the instructions that appear on the dashboard screen and run this command: sudo ./ome_docker_sh setup

Now, it’s time to start the streaming serv­ er. It should be ready now, and you can start OvenMediaEngine with the following com­mand (be sure to include your IP address):

$ OME_HOST_IP=1.2.3.4./ome_docker_launcher.sh start

Figure 2 shows what you’ll see once Oven­ MediaEngine is up and running. As you can tell in the image, these are the ports used by OvenMediaEngine.

Figure 2. Detail about ports once OvenMediaEngine starts

To complete the rest of the setup and other advanced items for OvenMediaEngine using the OME Docker Launcher, go to the Get­ting Started with OME Docker Launcher video tutorial. It will also walk you through setting up a TSL cer­tificate for use with OvenMediaEngine. You can find documentation for installation with Docker at go2sm.com/docker.

Sending Streams With OvenMediaEngine

Once OvenMediaEngine is installed and started, you can begin sending streams to the streaming server. To send an RTMP stream, you can use the common formatting for an RTMP stream for live encoding. What you need to keep in mind is that the default application for OvenMediaEngine is called “app.” There­fore, be sure to include this for any of your live encodes. Your stream name can be what­ever you’d like.

In the example shown in Figure 3 using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), rtmp is the protocol, and 1935 is the port used. Both are in­ cluded in the server field. The default applica­tion name is app, and that is included as well. Lastly, the stream name I chose is sample, but you can name yours whatever you’d like.

Figure 3. Sending streams

For testing playback, you have the option to use the secure TLS demo player (https://demo.ovenplayer.com) or non­-secure, non­TLS demo player (http://demo.ovenplayer.com). I used the non­TLS player for my testing when writing this article and used the following formatting to access the player: http://my.ip.address:8090. The formatting for using LL­-HLS and Web­

RTC for playback is as follows:

• http://myipaddress: 3333/app/sample/llhls.m3u8
• ws://myipaddress:3333/app/sample

Figure 4 shows what OvenMediaPlayer looks like for testing playback.

Figure 4. A view of streaming playback

Testing OvenMediaEngine

Here’s how I tested OvenMediaEngine. First, I was interested in whether I would be able to set up and configure the streaming server us­ing Docker. The free open-source version of OvenMediaEngine has more features, and in order to get that version working, I needed to use Docker.

Second, I wanted to see how well Oven­MediaEngine worked with ingesting SRT and RTMP live encodes using Videon’s LiveEdge Max and OBS. Third, I wanted to learn if Web­RTC and LL­-HLS streaming playback would be straightforward for newbies. Lastly, I was interested in testing latency.

Streaming Server Setup

Setting up OvenMediaEngine using the OME Docker Launcher was fast and easy. Because AirenSoft provided setup with scripts and other commands, it was a straightforward process. In addition, using Docker was effortless since I’m very comfortable with Bash scripting and AWS 

Testing Ingestion of Live Streams

Ingesting SRT and RTMP live encodes with OvenMediaEngine was also a straightforward process. The only tricky part was formatting the streamID so that it was percent­ encoded for SRT streams. Videon provided excellent guidance on how to format the streamID for LiveEdge Max and walked me through all of the elements to configure SRT setup with OvenMediaEngine using LiveEdge Max. After I ensured that my UDP port of 9999 was open on my EC2, the setup was simple from there. Videon’s assistance also guided me in config­uring SRT streams using OBS.

Here’s what I tested for ingest:

• LiveEdge Max—RTMP ingest
• OBS—RTMP ingest
• LiveEdge Max—SRT ingest
• OBS—SRT ingest

Setting up RTMP ingest with OvenMedia­ Engine was not difficult. Figure 5 shows the main settings configured in LiveEdge Max.

Figure 5. RTMP settings in LiveEdge Max

Configuring SRT ingest took a little more work because the streamID was needed in both OBS and LiveEdge Max.

Figure 6 shows the formatting of the stream­ ID needed for OBS. Users just need to select Cus­tom under Service and input their streamID.

Figure 6. StreamID added in OBS

Figure 7 shows the streamID for­matting needed for LiveEdge Max.

Figure 7. StreamID added in LiveEdge Max

Users will have to create an SRT setting in Outputs and enter the following:

Call Mode: Caller

URL: srt://ipaddressofserver:9999

Stream ID: srt%3A%2F%2Fmyipaddress%3A9999%2Fapp%2Fsample 

Overall, ingesting streams using SRT on OBS or LiveEdge Max worked great and with­out problems. My only issue was a user error by neglecting to open the UDP port for 9999 in my AWS security group.

Testing Streaming Playback

Streaming playback of WebRTC and LL­HLS went well for me. I used the non­TLS player for testing, and this worked smoothly for playing both types of streams. I did not in­ stall a TLS certificate on OvenMedia­ Engine to test streams over TLS.

Latency Testing

For latency testing, I tested both LiveEdge Max and OBS using most of the default settings in the presets for each. Figures 8 and 9 show what I used for both encoders.

Figure 8. Encoding settings used for testing LiveEdge Max

Figure 9. Encoding settings used for testing OBS

Tables 2 and 3 show the results from my tests.

Table 2. Latency testing with RTMP ingest

Table 3. Latency testing with SRT ingest

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I was pleased with the ability to install and configure Oven­ MediaEngine, even though I had no previous experience using Docker. The help resources and video AirenSoft pro­vided me were great, along with the company’s responses to my many questions along the way. I found myself very comfortable running commands in the command­line interface once Docker was up and running.

Additionally, I learned that ingesting RTMP and SRT live encodes to OvenMediaEngine us­ing LiveEdge Max and OBS works great and is easy if you format the streams properly. Con­figuring streaming playback with OvenMedia­ Engine over WebRTC and LL-­HLS was straight­forward for me. It should also be easy enough for novices to do as well. Even with using a smaller free tier instance for testing, the la­ tency results for my tests were good and well within range of what’s expected.

Two items I wanted to test but didn’t have enough time for were creating my own custom application outside of using the default applica­tion called “app” and adding my own encoding ladder for transcoding incoming live streams. I didn’t understand how to configure these items either and probably needed a little more guid­ ance from AirenSoft. It might be nice to have a graphical user interface in the future to simplify more complex application setups for creating custom applications and allowing users to add encod­ing ladders for live transcoding.

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