I’m just getting started with video streaming development and finding it tough to locate beginner-friendly tutorials. Can someone point me toward learning materials for HTTP Live Streaming beyond what Apple offers?
My goal is to build a platform like Ustream where people can stream live video to many viewers at once. I’ve looked into services such as wowza and encoding.com, but their documentation assumes you already know a lot about streaming technology.
What’s the complexity level for building a basic streaming service similar to these popular platforms? I want to focus on mobile apps and web browsers initially. Any guidance would be great.
Also wondering if anyone has experience combining wowza streaming with Parse backend services?
Building a streaming platform from scratch is ambitious but totally doable. I spent 18 months on a similar project and here’s what I learned: get comfortable with video codecs and adaptive bitrate streaming before you start coding anything. For learning, start with FFmpeg docs and mess around with basic transcoding first. Build that foundation before jumping into streaming servers. MDN’s WebRTC documentation is actually way better than most streaming guides out there. Expect to spend serious time on infrastructure scaling and CDN integration. Mobile delivery is a whole other beast - you’ll deal with network handoffs and battery drain issues. Parse should handle user management and metadata fine, but you’ll need separate solutions for the actual video pipeline. Wowza’s learning curve is brutal at first, but their community forums saved me countless times when I was getting started.
ugh, i feel ya! the starter tutorials are few and far between. nginx-rtmp is def a good choice to ease into things. webRTC is cool but can get tricky when you scale. make sure to keep that in mind!
Complexity depends on how much you want to DIY vs using existing services. I did this exact thing two years ago - biggest pain was wrapping my head around the whole video pipeline from capture to delivery. Don’t dive into complex tutorials right away. Get basic RTMP ingest working first. Start with Node Media Server - way easier than Wowza for beginners. Once you get RTMP ingestion, move to HLS segmentation and delivery. Mobile’s tricky - iOS Safari needs HLS, Android’s more flexible with formats. Parse integration’s pretty straightforward for auth and stream metadata, but keep video processing separate. Heads up - bandwidth costs add up fast once you’re testing multiple concurrent streams. I’d prototype with simpler tools first, then move to enterprise stuff like Wowza when you actually need the advanced features.