Live Streaming Setup

The Live Streaming service is disabled for newly created accounts.

To have the service activated for your account, please Contact Us.

Once activated, you can easily configure your live streaming zone by following the below step-by-step guide:

1. Log in to the Universal CDN Control Panel at my.ucdn.com.
2. Navigate to the Livestreaming tab located in the left panel menu.
3. In the My Livestreaming Zone section, click on the New Live Stream button:

4. You will then be directed to the zone’s Main Settings page.

Let’s take a closer look at each section:

1. General Settings

Stream name: Enter a friendly name for your Live Stream zone.
Enable HLS via CDN: Check this option to enable HLS via HTTP. The CDN system will convert/transmux the incoming RTMP stream into the HLS format.
Include Base Stream in master.m3u8: Check this option to include the Base Stream in the master.m3u8 file. If you’d like to use the Master file and no transcoded streams are added, activate this option. Otherwise, keep this option deactivated to avoid issues when switching between transcoded and Base streams, as the duration of the .ts segments may differ.

2. Recordings (optional): Enables the recording of individual clips of the base, transcoded or DVR live streams, allowing your community to watch them later on-demand.

Keep copies in UCDN storage: Select a UCDN storage where the clips will be stored. Create storages from the Storage section in your UCDN control panel (https://my.ucdn.com/storage/).
Target duration per uploaded file: Choose a duration for each individual clip (min 30 minutes, max 6 hours). Example: If you set the value to 30 minutes and your Base stream runs for 2 hours, there will be four 30-minute clips uploaded to your UCDN storage.

3. DVR (optional): The DVR feature allows viewers to pause, rewind, and resume during the live stream.

Keep full stream: Check this option to save the entire DVR stream, including all the segments and playlists. This is useful for archiving or reviewing content after the live event has concluded.
DVR session timeout: Specifies the duration of inactivity required before a DVR session is considered complete. When a session is deemed finished, the system processes and uploads any remaining segments and playlists.
Stream rewind window: Define the maximum amount of time a viewer can rewind within the live stream session. For instance, if set to 2 hours, viewers can go back up to 2 hours from the current live point in the stream. The system automatically removes older segments that fall outside this time window.

4. Base Stream Transcodings (optional): This feature allows you to create custom streams with different resolutions, framerates, and bitrates, or modify the transcoding parameters of the Base Stream to meet your specific needs.

Note: You can have only one transcoding for a given combination of resolution and FPS.
For example, you can have one 1080p 60FPS transcoding, rather than several ones with different bitrates.
To provide different bitrate options for your viewers, create transcodings with different resolutions and frame rates instead.

To create a stream with a different bitrate, resolution, fps from the base stream, click on the Add button:

From the pop-up window, adjust the parameters of the new transcoding slot for the base stream.

– Resolution: You can choose between 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p or 2160p resolutions.

– Frame Rate: (FPS). You can choose between 30, 60 or Custom (2 -120) FPS.
Note that 60 FPS is only available for resolutions above 480p.

– Video Codec: Choose H.264.

– Video Bitrate: Choose between Low, Medium (default), High or Custom (100-50000 kbps) video bitrates.

The low, medium, high values for video bitrate are determined by a combination of the selected resolution and FPS, as per the table below:

Note: Тhe video bitrate selection (low, medium, high) is maintained when resolution or FPS are changed.
Example: Initial transcoding is 1080p-60fps with Low bitrate (4500 kbps); changing to 720p-60fps requires Low bitrate (3000 kbps).

– Profile: You can choose between baseline, main or high profile. More additional information you can find here!

– Audio codec: Choose AAC.

– Audio Bitrate: Choose between Low (128 kbps) – default, Medium (256 kbps), High (320 kbps) or Custom (48 – 320 kbps) audio bitrates.

5. RTMP Restreams (optional): Universal CDN allows you to restream your base stream or your transcoded streams to a third-party video sharing or streaming media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, etc.

Obtain the Publish URL and Stream Key from the platform where you will restream your sessions.

As you can see in the example below, transcoding of the Base stream has been restreamed in the YouTube platform:

6. Domain name (CNAME) (optional): Add multiple CNAME records for each Live Stream zone and point them to the given domain name of your zone.

7. Select the ‘Add Live Stream Zone’ button to save your new live stream zone.

Additional Information

Locate your Public URL and Public Key: From the ‘Instructions’ page (under zone settings), obtain the Publish URL and Publish Key, which you can add to any RTMP supporting client to push your local stream to a UCDN Live Streaming zone or Restream Platforms (e.g., YouTube, Twitch, etc.), if such option is enabled.

The Publish URL and Publish Key are also provided on the ‘Main settings’ page.

Play Livestream: If you have an active stream running, you can play it by selecting the ‘Play Livestream‘ button.

Streaming Events and Duration Logs: Use audit logs to monitor streaming events and their duration. To access this information, click on the ‘log‘ button from the main ‘Livestreaming’ section (https://my.ucdn.com/live-streams/).