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- Two years ago, I created a video streaming server from scratch in Node; looking back, I realized that I must have had way too much free time.
- I wanted something that I could use to embed videos in websites and aggregate all of my public videos.
- In the end, I created a lightweight node application with an administration interface, API tokens, and the ability to stream videos.
- Now, I can embed videos in my blog like this:
-
- <customHTML />
-
- Although I could have accomplished the same thing with zero effort by using Youtube-- that's now how I roll.
- I wanted to get better at programming with Node, and I wanted a self-hostable lightweight open-source project.
-
- Let's take a quick look at the website I ended up building:
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- 
-
- The videos project's main page is a gallery that displays all of the videos on the same page with a search bar at the top for filtering.
- What is notable about this page is that all of the icons displayed are gifs generated by the backend using [ffmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/).
- After you click on a video, it takes you to a separate page to watch the video or download it.
- Additionally, the video page lets you copy a streamable link to the video so you can embed it in a website or open it in VLC.
-
- The next notable feature of the website is the user management and privilege aspect of the system.
- Regular users can log into the website and watch non-listed videos.
- Additionally, administrators can manage other users and generate API tokens.
- API tokens get used to generate video share links to watch a non-listed video without log-into the website.
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- 
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- There is also a page listed "System Controls."
- The system page enables admin users to update some environment variables like where the videos are located and the server's URL.
- The server URL gets used when generating share links for end-users to copy and share.
- The re-index button tells the system to scan for new videos and generate icons.
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- 
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- Being able to download a full video is straightforward since you just serve the entire file.
- However, to stream a video, you have to send it to the client chunk by chunk, and which chunk gets downloaded gets determined by the end client-- enabling things like buffering and skipping forward.
- The following code snippet is the core node code that I ended up using to provide this functionality.
- The client sends a byte array indicating the range in which they want to download.
- The server then responds by reading that portion of the video file and sending it to the client.
-
- ```javascript
- const parts = request.headers.range.replace(/bytes=/, "").split("-");
- const start = parseInt(parts[0], 10);
- const end = parts[1]
- ? parseInt(parts[1], 10)
- : fileSize-1;
-
- const chunksize = (end-start)+1;
- const file = fs.createReadStream(path, {start, end});
- const head =
- {
- 'Content-Range': `bytes ${start}-${end}/${fileSize}`,
- 'Accept-Ranges': 'bytes',
- 'Content-Length': chunksize,
- 'Content-Type': 'video/mp4',
- };
- result.writeHead(206, head);
- file.pipe(result);
- ```
-
- Another fun tidbit from this project is that I just created a Docker script to run the project.
- The Docker container gets derived from a generic node container, and then I installed the ffmpeg and gifski packages-- enabling me to generate the video icons.
-
- ```bash
- FROM node:buster-slim
-
- COPY package.json package.json
-
- RUN apt-get update && \
- apt-get install ffmpeg -y && \
- apt-get install wget -y && \
- cd /root && \
- wget https://github.com/jrtechs/static-storage/raw/master/gifski.deb && \
- dpkg -i /root/gifski.deb && \
- rm /root/gifski.deb
-
- RUN npm install
-
- EXPOSE 4000
- WORKDIR /src/
- CMD npm start
- ```
-
- Although I don't use this project a lot, I maintain it since it is effortless to host and allows me to share videos without using a centralized service like YouTube. If you are interested in the project, check it out on [Github](https://github.com/jrtechs/HomeBrewPlex) and contribute by submitting issues and creating pull requests.
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