Total control of your media
MistServer allows for various methods to control who can and cannot access your media. It can be as simple as only allowing users in certain subnets to access your video. More complex by adding your own Trigger/Webhook system that does checks on various factors like tokens, addresses or your own accounting database or a fully standardized method like JWT access through various security management tools. MistServer even has extended support by allowing tokens such as JWTs to be checked against as a stream name, which adds security to protocols normally incompatible with the chosen method. No matter what solution you pick or build you can be sure that it can be customized to fit your needs, is set according to your user experience and is made to work with your preferred method of control.
Building a platform without downtime
Whether it is updating your server or scheduling maintenance MistServer can handle this without connection loss. Every connection within MistServer is unique and spawned the moment it is needed and kept active. This means that should you update MistServer while it is in production any new connection is upgraded to the newer version of MistServer, while existing connections stay on the older build until they are closed. This allows for an uninterrupted service even while updating.
Should you prefer scheduled maintenance taking servers offline while they are being serviced there is a graceful option for this as well. Simply remove MistServer from the load balancer and new connections will no longer arrive at your server. Allowing you to slowly fade out the users, update the server and restore the load balancer configuration to add it back to your active production servers.
Of course the benefits do not stop at maintenance, combine these methods with our advanced analytics to build a lean and mean platform performing as efficient as possible.
Upgrade your media
Whenever new media is added to MistServer you can access all metadata and review the tracks available. Should you find the available media data lacking or missing features you can add these whether your source is live or on demand. For live streams you can set up checks based on the source quality and add additional tracks to cover devices and players otherwise not supported at the quality level you desire. Best practices with Video on Demand (VoD) is to schedule processing and creation of additional qualities at known quiet times handling all the processing when you have room to spare. Of course that does not mean that you cannot do so immediately for high priority content anyway. You are in full control of your media.
The most viewers out of your hardware
Our highly efficient shared memory buffer allows multiple viewers to view the same stream from the same buffer without risks. No viewer or output can affect another while keeping the efficiency of watching the stream at the highest possible level. It is in fact so efficient we haven't seen the need for a viewer limit based on CPU or RAM since the start of the project. The only true limit so far has been bandwidth, thanks to this MistServer can easily serve thousands of viewers from any modern CPU.
Still, should your server reach that CPU or bandwidth limit, simply adding another server to the load balancer will have your system scaled up within seconds. Should you still hit your limits you can leverage the Frameworks network to assist for those peak moments, ensuring that your hardware is used first and foremost.
Sounds too good to be true? Try it out and see for yourself.