1004727 - Support for the RTMP/RTMFP protocols

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Audio/Video, enhancement)

Description

[sworddragon2]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140428193813



Actual results:

Firefox is able to play videos directly or indirectly that are encoded with many common codecs but there are also many videos/streams that are delivered over the rtmp/rtmfp protocol and their variants. Trying to play a video over rtmp/rtmfp with the video tag will fail.


Expected results:

Firefox could implement/emulate these protocols to be able to play all videos with HTML5 only that the Adobe Flash Player is able to play (so that we can get rid even more of the Flash Player).

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Mozilla is focused on WebRTC, which uses WebSockets, not RTMP.

Comment 2

[sworddragon2]

Maybe this could then be implemented as compatibility layer (forwarding requests from RTMP/RTMFP to WebRTC to achieving compatibility with staying on WebRTC).

Comment 3

[sworddragon2]

Any reason why this was changed to target the Flash Player? Actually this feature request was intended to target the HTML/JS implementation.

If I'm not wrong the HTML5 specifications doesn't restrict the video tag to a protocol so RTMP could be easily implemented here. Then only a solution for RTMFP on WebRTC is needed (or doesn't WebRTC limit the protocols too?).

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Kohei, please be careful triaging, you put this in the wrong component. This bug seems to be a valid request for supporting RTMP in <video>. I don't see a duplicate request, so this is a feature request the audio/video and networking teams would need to triage.

This seems like a valuable platform addition to me, and might be better than having everyone roll their own streaming using JS and MSE, but I'm not sure what this would cost or whether the specifications are free.

ajones, who is the right person to make a decision about this?

Comment 5

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

These protocols are currently supported by Flash so it would make sense to put them on Shumway backlog.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Well, I read this bug report specifically about whether we'd implement them for <video>. But I'll take your comment as enough to mark this NEW ;-)

Comment 7

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

We have WebRTC for real-time streaming and DASH (via JS/MSE) for non-realtime streaming, so the functionality is already covered. The only reason to implement RTMP/RTMFP would be for compatibility with important existing services that won't update to those technologies. AFAIK there are no such services.

Comment 8

[sworddragon2]

> AFAIK there are no such services.

There are many services still relying on RTMP/RTMFP (at least this counts for germany). The question is just, if it is worth implementing it. The advantage would be that users don't need the Flash Player anymore if they want to use such streaming services. The disadvantage would be more or less that these services would maybe then even longer rely on these protocols from Adobe.

Comment 9

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Can you give us some links? How are they planning to support clients that don't have Flash, like any mobile platform?

Comment 10

[Yury Delendik (:yury)]

(In reply to sworddragon2 from comment #8)
> There are many services still relying on RTMP/RTMFP (at least this counts
> for germany).

It will be nice to have the list of the services that still relying on RTMP/RTMFP. sworddragon2, can you compile this list for us?

Shumway team is already tracking RTMP protocol implementation at https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/issues/898 and https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/issues/900. Not sure if we need to track RTMFP.

Comment 11

[sworddragon2]

> Can you give us some links?

From the free accessible services I'm finding:

http://www.live-stream.tv/ (uses RTMP) and many sites that are streaming over http://peer-stream.com/ (uses RTMFP) for example http://schoener-fernsehen.com/.

There is also https://magine.com/ but it does rely on Silverlight (if I'm not wrong it uses RTSP) and is not fully free and needs registration. There is also the non-free http://zattoo.com/ which uses the Flash Player (but they seem not to stream over RTMP, maybe they are using HTTP).


I have also an indirect own example: I'm developing a web-based application called TvoIP. It is a programmable television that allows in theory to show any video stream that is public. Currently it relies on the Flash Player as the free accessible streaming services here in germany rely on RTMP/RTMFP (because of this implementing HTML5/WebRTC support has currently a low priority).