hits
Cherokee 0.99.0 Hits The Streets
Here I am, with the announcement of our latest version of the Cherokee Web Server. It's been a month since the previous stable release, so we have had some time to work on a couple of new interesting features:
- Traffic Shaping: Now Cherokee supports traffic shaping without requiring any external module. Bandwidth limits can be assigned to individual rules independently of the handler that servers the connection. This means, it doesn't matter whether it's serving and static file, replying FastCGI or rendering SSI, it will be able to set fine-grain (per-connection) bandwidth usage limits.
Audio/Video Streaming: Well, this is one of those highly visible features that you love to talk about! :-) We have written a new Cherokee module for streaming media files. This plug-in works with the new Traffic Shaper, so the right after Cherokee figures the media file bitrate, it can limit the connection bandwidth usage to that value. In that way, if the client stops watching the video before it's finished, the server wouldn't have wasted bandwidth. This feature supports almost all of the most widespread media formats (encoders and containers): flv, mp3, mp4 (h264), mpg, avi, ogg, mkv, etc.
Besides the bit-rating analysis, this plug also supports the ?start= parameter. That allows some web based players to seek to any position to the file while it's playing. This is a pretty neat feature that even today some tube sites are still missing. The seeking support is currently working only for FLV files. The H264 support is on the way, hopefully we'll finish it soon.
Here you can find a few examples that I've uploaded to my server:
Besides this two fancy new features, we have also fixed a few bugs, and implemented some lower level stuff: Chained SSL certificates, SSL client certificates support, internal error redirections, etc.
Enjoy it! :-)
Comments
Can I watch the streams with something other than FLASH? Don't have that, 'cause it sucks.
@mike : Well maybe Gnash or SwfDec @developpers : Is a .htaccess emulation feature planned ? It's the only missing thing preventing my move from Apache to Cherokee...
Well, I have swfdec installed, but it does not cope yet with the really 'advanced' FLASH stuff... Not sure how this could work/be useful in FF3.1 though. If I could directly skip to the middle of a video embedded via the video-tag that certainly would be useful.
> "This feature supports almost all of the most widespread media formats (encoders and containers): flv, mp3, mp4 (h264), mpg, avi, ogg, mkv, etc." What is the multimedia framework you used ? Gstreamer ? FFMpeg ? (I suppose you didn't write all the codecs again)
@bochecha: Yep, it uses FFMpeg underneath..
@Alvaro: what was the technical reason for choosing ffmpeg over gstreamer (or any other multimedia framework) ? FFMpeg is not (and will not be) included in the Fedora/RHEL repositories (and certainly in other distributions) due to patent issues, so it might be complicated to integrating Cherokee with this awesome feature.
I'm curious if H.264 seeking support might be in a 0.99 build soon. I think you'd be the first HTTP server to support H.264 out of the box if you did this. I'd love to see this soon!
Hello, do you know where I can find a win32 build of this?
It would be nice if someone can tell how to enable streaming functions in cherokee after a plain install. Maybe a sample configuration file?
I've figured out how to enable streaming and bandwith shaping but it doesn't let me forward / revind video file with ?start=XXX Parameter (FLV videos have been processed and they work fine with lighttpd / nginx)
I can't figure out how to enable this. I could really use it because I have two dedicated servers at the max 90% of the time streaming video on my site. If you know how to turn this on email me at admin@hessmo.com Thanks in advance.
Big THANK YOU for the video!!!!! you made me smile!
