How to stream all videos in a folder? - ffmpeg

Question

Hi i want to stream videos over web using ffserver. i got this link as reference.
Now what i am not able to figure out is how to pass a folder(which content all videos i want to stream) as input to stream all videos. I also want add more videos dynamically to this folder in time to time and streaming should happen(like how it works in Darwin). now i can't use Darwin because it doesn't support for iOS.
please give me a suggestion.
is there any other open source tool by which i can do this?

Answer 1

I wrote a bash script for this, it's working in ubuntu 16
Hopefully someone else can write it up in a less terrible language
Here's the script:
echo -e "HTTPPort 8090\nHTTPBindAddress 0.0.0.0\nMaxHTTPConnections 2000\nMaxClients 1000\nMaxBandwidth 1000\nCustomLog -\n<Stream stat.html>\nFormat status\n</Stream>"
num=1
for i in *.mp3; do
echo -e "<Stream \"$(urlencode $i)\">\nFile \"$(pwd)/$i\"\nFormat mp2\nAudioCodec libmp3lame\nAudioBitRate 64\nAudioChannels 1\nAudioSampleRate 44100\nNoVideo\n</Stream>"
done
save this as a bash script in the folder you want to serve, I'll refer to it as:
./gen_ffserver_conf.sh
it's hard coded for mp3, you'd have to sort through my echos to get it to do another format.
run the server with:
ffserver -f <(bash -e ./gen_ffserver_conf.sh)
I had to install a package for the url encoding:
sudo apt install gridsite-clients
(and of course you need ffserver as well, in the ffmpeg package)
I stream the files by going to:
http://<ip address of streaming server>:8090/stat.html
and clicking on the urlencoded values, (using chromium). This will open the stream and start playing.
Explanation:
ffserver doesn't like wildcards, or at least I never figured that out, so I'm just creating an entry for each file in the server. The urlencoding is annoying but necessary for the stat page links to work properly.