[gst-devel] Saving a live stream

[Hayden Andrews]

Hi guys,

We have a live A/V Ogg stream that runs for a couple of hours, but we 
want to be able to save an (approximately) 40 min section of this stream 
to a file.

First of all, I wrote a quick Perl script which reads directly from the 
appropriate HTTP port (an Icecast Server) and writes to a file. 
Everything looks fine with this file except ..
  1) Suppose we record from 40 mins to 1:20 of the live stream. When we 
play the file, the current time starts at the time we started recording 
from rather than from 00:00. Although the run time is correct (40 mins), 
the current time progresses from 40mins to 1:20.
  2) When someone tries to edit the file to trim each end and make any 
other minor changes that are required, seeking takes forever and the 
editor takes for ever to do things that would normally be quite quick 
with a normal file. I believe that if the file has a play time of about 
40 mins, then the player says that it will take about 40 mins to do many 
tasks.

I figure that since a live stream has an unknown length, and since it is 
not possible to seek when viewing a live stream, that there is missing 
info in the live stream that needs to be inserted while saving. So, I 
also figure that it would be easy to insert the relevant requirements 
while saving a live stream to file.....

So, I edited my script to use Gstreamer instead. I have used souphttpsrc 
! filesink and I've used souphttpsrc ! decodebin ! ...... ! oggmux ! 
filesink. I hoped that the filesink would expect to insert [what ever is 
needed] and would do [something] automatically. But we still get files 
which are difficult to edit. So, I tried setting do-timestamp=true in 
southttpsrc which produced a file, which when played by vlc, showed 
either a very short (2-3 seconds) or unknown run time, and crashed the 
player when I tried seeking within the file being played.

So, what should I be doing? Any ideas.... I expect that this is a simple 
and normal scenario as I'm sure that it is more than normal to be saving 
portions of live streams to file for later editing/playing.

Cheers,


Hayden