User Manual

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You will find live events in the customer portal using CMS/LIVE EVENTS

Inputs

Inputs are available in the section Input & Sources. Note that editing inputs might be disabled and not available. Enabled or not is a customer setting in out platform depending on your contract with RedBee and your use case.

Inputs can be of different types

• RTMP - you can push an RTMP stream to this input
• REFERENCE - this input is referencing an existing 24x7 live channel. Using this you as a customer can expose specific time slots as live events.

When creating a new input using the customer portal it will be of type RTMP.

Reference inputs are made available after agreement with RedBee.

When created, the static RTMP endpoint information can be viewed for an RTMP input. Here you can directly see the static URL to be used when pushing data to this input.

Create new live event

New live events are created by clicking the Create button within ADD NEW EVENT.

In the popup you can provide details for your event.

When creating a live event you can provide

• Input. You have to select one of he predefined inputs
• You should give the input a descriptive name. Will only be visible for administrators such as yourself.
• Start. When should this event start.
• End. When should this event end.
• Encrypted. Should this event be encrypted or not. Note that this is for the asset available for end users. Your input stream must be unencrypted.

List live events

There are two different views to be used when listing and finding live events

Calendar view

In the calendar view you can see each event per day in a calendar. The ones using the same input has the same color. You can filter on specific inputs using the input filter above to the left,

If you select preview you can see when preview is available for each event. Here you can see that two of the events are using the same event channel so they will actually have the same preview time. Also note that preview will start before the first event.

When you select an event you get a number of available actions.

• Edit the event
• Delete the event
• Edit the event asset
• Preview the event
• View status log

Table view

In the table you can see events in a list. The ones using the same input has the same color. You can filter on specific inputs using the input filter above to the left,

From the table view you can

• Edit the event
• Edit the event asset
• Delete the event
• Preview the event
• View status log

Statuses

In the table view you can see the status for an event. Not that this is most of the time actually the status of the underlaying event channel since that is the one that has a status.

Currently the following statuses are available (subject to be changed at any point in time).

• NEW - The chanel has just been created. It does not have any resources or info attached to it yet.
• CREATING - It is being added into the platform.
• CREATED - It is created it in the platform. Note that it is just registered. Nothing really exists yet. It does not consume any resources.
• STARTING_BY_SYSTEM - It is being started. Resources are allocated.
• RUNNING - It is running. All resources are allocated and it is fully functional. The stream can be previewed.
• STOPPING_BY_SYSTEM - It is being stopped. Some resources are being deallocated. No new data is being stored.
• STOPPED_BY_SYSTEM - Some resources are stopped and deallocated.
• LIVE_2_VOD_SCHEDULED - Request has been sent to generate VODs
• LIVE_2_VOD_CREATED - VODs have been generated, both for the whole event channel and for each event.
• CLEARING - Final cleanup is in progress, remaining resources are stopped and deallocated.
• DONE - Everything is done.
• ERROR - Something failed so the status for the live event is unknown

The status log shows all status changes in the past for the live event channel.

Running

When the channel is started and fully functional you can see that the status is running.

When the channel is running you can select preview and you will be able to see the stream even though the event is not started.

Live

When an event is actually live this is also visible in the event table.

Handling errors

We will of course try to make sure that your live events are managed automatically by our plattform according to your input. In case of any error the live event will end up in status ERROR and if this should happen there will also be an active retry button.

Pushing data

Currently we only support one protocol and that is RTMP. You can use any tool that is able to produce a valid RTMP stream to push the data.

As soon as an input is available you can find the RTMP url that should be used. This will be kept the same during the full input lifecycle. You can find the url both in the input details and in the preview popup.

Note that most tool expect the URL to be separated into a URL and a key so we have separated them in the same way.

Export events

When there are many events it might be hard to keep track of them. There might also be a need for sending the information to a supplier that does not have access to the customer portal. To achieve this we have the export function that will export events for a selected time period to a csv file (can be imported into excel). Generate a report by clicking the Create button within EXPORT EVENTS. In the popup you can select start and end dates for the report.

Save event as a persistent VOD

If you do not do anything the event asset(s) will be kept as a part of the event/event channel. So if you delete the event you will also delete the asset and the generated vod. To avoid this you must manually choose to transfer it into a vod.

When the creation of the VOD material is completed the RELEASE VOD option becomes enabled on the event asset page. Click this and confirm that you want to change this asset from an event to a VOD.

Switch input source

Note that this functionality is only available for selected customers. It is not available by default.

It is possible to switch content in the stream that is being sent out to the end users between what is coming in through the input and a pre-defined pre-uploaded mp4 file.

If available it can be done in the button of the preview popup. The channel source can be switched between primary endpoint and predefiend VOD by selecting either option above the player and then clicking "Select". The green play icon indicates which of the sources is currently playing.