Today most of the content / information, be it product selling, trainings, is delivered through video on web. Your customers want to watch videos on their favourite devices: laptop, tablet and smart phones. The key factor here is your videos should be able to load instantly and the quality of delivery should be good for them to stay on that video till end of the delivery.

NGINX Plus as delivery for streaming media helps to stream video content to any device. With NGINX Plus, your videos load quickly and reliably.

NGINX Plus helps deliver MP4 and FLV video content using progressive downloads. It also extends its capabilities to support adaptive streaming for Video-On-Demand applications with Apple HLS and Adobe HDS. Adaptive streaming allows video player to select the most appropriate bit-rate in real-time.

HLS

The ngx_http_hls_module module provides HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) server-side support for H.264/AAC files. Such files typically have .mp4, .m4v, or .m4a filename extensions.

Nginx supports two URIs for each MP4 file:

• The playlist URI that ends with “.m3u8” and accepts the optional “len” argument that defines the fragment length in seconds;
• The fragment URI that ends with “.ts” and accepts “start” and “end” arguments that define fragment boundaries in seconds.

HLS functionality can be used along with the NGINX ngx_http_hls_module to generate authorized, time-limited links based on unique client data such as a cookie or source IP address. This provides a strong degree of protection against misuse of the video service

HDS

Video is first prepared using Adobe’s f4fpackager tool, to generate manifest (filename extension.f4m), fragment (.f4f) and index (.f4x) files. These files are then published to the web server, and NGINX Plus’ f4f handler delivers them.

Session Log Aggregation feature

All of the requests in a single time-limited session are combined, and the total data transferred is logged. All other parameters are taken from the first request in the session.

With these powerful features, and bandwidth controls, NGINX Plus is gaining more acceptance as a solution to deliver video content, on-premises or in the cloud.

– Sandeep Khuperkar I CTO and Director, Ashnik