Title: Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working
Tags: english, video, nuug, frikanalen
Date: 2015-02-08 13:00

<p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
am involved in the Norwegian open channel
<ahref="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
activity in the <ahref="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>

<p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
<a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>

<p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
distribute the TV content.  The
<a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
following activity, we now have the schedule
<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>