blog/data/2015-02-08-frikanalen-video-monitor.txt

   1 Title: Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working
   2 Tags: english, video, nuug, frikanalen
   3 Date: 2015-02-08 13:00
   4
   5 <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
   6 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
   7 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
   8 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
   9 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
  10 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
  11 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
  12 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
  13 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
  14 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
  15 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
  16 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
  17
  18 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
  19 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
  20 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
  21 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
  22
  23 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
  24 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
  25 distribute the TV content.  The
  26 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
  27 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
  28 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
  29 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
  30 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
  31 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
  32 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
  33 following activity, we now have the schedule
  34 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
  35 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
  36 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
  37 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
  38
  39 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
  40 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
  41 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
  42 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
  43 streams are working as they should.</p>