Hello,

We currently use Flash Media Live Encoder to encode our weekly church services to a Flash Media Server running on Amazon EC2 & CloudFront. We present an Apple HLS Stream for iDevices, Androids, Macs, and PCs (via an embedded JWPlayer on our website).

This arrangement "works" for almost all viewing devices (exception being Windows Phone), and it covers the licensing cost of an H.264 encoder. The vMix "Streaming" button aligns nicely with this architecture.

But it seems like a waste of resources (and money) to spin up an EC2 instance for Flash Media Server simply to create an HLS stream. HLS stream creation is not complicated: it involves segmenting an MPEG-TS transport stream into 10-second-long files, then updating a playlist (.m3u8 file) to point to those files.

In my view, the FMLE / FMS combo can be replaced by (the free) FFMPEG and Apache (or IIS). FFMPEG would connect to the vMix DirectShow capture devices, perform H.264/AAC encoding, mux the streams, segment them on 10-second keyframes, and update the playlist (it has all of these capabilities today). A simple PowerShell script would immediately FTP these files to a webserver for hosting.

My feature request is to make the "Streaming" button more generic; don't hardcode it to a FMLE Profile, but rather have it launch a Windows command-line process: "FMLECmd /p" for FMLE users, "ffmpeg -f dshow" for FFMPEG users, etc.

Thanks for your consideration,

Jon