Shortly speaking, each feed element logically represents each of your input sources. The possibility to associate a feed with more output streams is useful when you want to stream one input source (for example, your webcam with audio) using several different output formats (for example, streaming a full HD video and a small-size preview video for mobile phones) at the same time. It's useless for the input source to provide the same stream input to several feeds, since ffserver already has got a way of associating a single feed to multiple output streams.įeed element is an internal part of ffserver which has a purpose to associate one input source with one or more output streams. Binding one input source to multiple feeds is possible and makes sense only if the input source can produce different stream input for each feed it is bound to. Input sources will connect to ffserver and bind themselves with one or more feeds if those feeds are not bound with some other input source at that moment. Since ffmpeg is mostly used as an input source, we'll describe it here in this document. These elements are not part of internal structure of ffserver tool, but rather represent external applications (usually ffmpeg), which can send audio/video streams to ffserver that will be distributed (broadcast) to all the viewers (media players). There are several elements shown on the image. Let's take a closer look of ffserver, to better describe its possibilities. The purpose of the above image is to visually show the ability to separate parts of your streaming system into pieces that can be deployed around the world, allowing you to broadcast various live events without the need to change the structure of your streaming media system. Various input sources (ffmpeg applications) can be used to 'feed' the broadcasting server (ffserver) with multimedia content that will be distributed to multiple clients for viewing. The simple diagram is shown on the image below: It is able to collect multiple input sources (usually ffmpeg applications) and transcode/remux/broadcast each of them using multiple output streams.

If you need to stream your audio/video content over the internet, you'll usually need a streaming (broadcasting) server, one of which is ffserver. Or try an alternative such as mkvserver_mk2. The original documentation has been archived and can be downloaded as HTML or PDF while the sample ffserver configuration file can be found below. If you still need it checkout commit 2ca65fc or use the 3.4 release branch.

Ffmpeg rtsp streaming example