Boombox - a simple streaming library on top of Membrane

Elixir Framework Forums Membrane Forum
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Hi everyone,

I’d like to share with you a new library from the Membrane team - Boombox. It’s a simple streaming tool built on top of Membrane. It’s not as flexible as Membrane, but simpler to learn :wink:
For example, receiving an RTMP stream and broadcasting it via HLS is as simple as

Mix.install([:boombox])

Boombox.run(input: "rtmp://localhost:5432", output: "index.m3u8")

Boombox also allows you to interact with media in the Elixir code using a Stream-based API. For example, here’s how to generate a video and send it to a browser over WebRTC using Boombox and Image:

Mix.install([:boombox, :image, :req])

image =
  Req.get!("https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/25247695?s=200&v=4").body
  |> Image.open!()

angle = Stream.iterate(0, fn a -> rem(a + 3, 360) end)

timestamps =
  Stream.iterate(0, fn pts -> pts + div(Membrane.Time.seconds(1), 60) end)

Stream.zip(angle, timestamps)
|> Stream.map(fn {angle, pts} ->
  image = Image.rotate!(image, angle) |> Image.thumbnail!(200)
  %Boombox.Packet{kind: :video, payload: image, pts: pts}
end)
|> Boombox.run(
  input: {:stream, video: :image, audio: false},
  output: {:webrtc, "ws://localhost:8830"}
)

And there’s much more - see examples.

More info in the blog post.

We hope that Boombox will make media streaming in Elixir easier for everyone and smooth out the learning curve for Membrane :wink:

Happy streaming!

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Fantastic work! I can’t wait to play with this.

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Thanks! Specially for you, thumbnails :tada:

Boombox.run(input: "file.mp4", output: {:stream, video: :image, audio: false})
|> Stream.chunk_by(fn packet -> div(packet.pts, Membrane.Time.seconds(2)) end)
|> Stream.map(fn chunk -> hd(chunk).payload |> Image.thumbnail!(200) end)
|> Stream.with_index()
|> Enum.each(fn {thumbnail, i} -> Image.write(thumbnail, "thumb_#{i}.jpg") end)
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You can just do Image.open() on a binary too (at least for most common image formats).

Great project, can’t wait to give this a spin!

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Thanks, that’s much better! And thanks again for Image, it’s been a pleasure to use and docs are wonderful :wink:

6

This is very cool!

I have a locally-running project that’s using MediaMTX to convert some IP camera RTSP streams to WebRTC (WHEP), which I then display in-browser using LiveView JS hooks. It looks like Boombox doesn’t quite replace this yet, but I’m looking forward to the day when I can plug something like this into my application and Phoenix router and have everything done in Elixir-land. :smile:

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Receiving RTSP and forwarding via WebRTC is already supported:

Boombox.run(input: "rtsp://my.rtsp.stream/", output: {:webrtc, "ws://signaling_url"})

but it’s point-to-point and WHEP is not there yet. But it’s going to change soon :wink:

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Yep! I was looking through some issues yesterday and saw that work was being done in membrane_plugin_webrtc and elsewhere :slight_smile:

What I’d eventually love would be something like…

# my_app/application.ex
children = [
  {Boombox, inputs: [cam1: "rtsp://...", cam2: "rtsp://..."], name: MyApp.Boombox}
  # ...
]

# my_app_web/router.ex
boombox_routes "/cams", boombox: MyApp.Boombox

and be able to hit /cams/cam1/whep to get things going :eyes:. This is just be spitballing, though – everything y’all are doing is insanely cool regardless!

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This is very helpful, please keep doing it :smiley: I’d love to hear about more potential use cases that people have

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Fantastic! Does Boombox support transcoding RTMP input to include multiple resolutions in the HLS output? Perhaps offloading the transcoding job to a different server/service?

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Not yet. Added to the wishlist though :smiley: You may also check out this Membrane plugin: GitHub - membraneframework/membrane_abr_transcoder_plugin: ABR (adaptive bitrate) transcoder, that accepts an h.264 video and outputs multiple variants of it with different qualities.

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