Introduction

MistServer is a free, full-featured streaming media toolkit. It enables you to take any media from any location, using any method, and deliver it seamlessly to anyone, anywhere, in any format.

It is open source and can integrate with Livepeer's streaming API to transcode video at scale.

MistServer is particularly known for being able to automate video workflows, having best in class compatibility and being deployable with any streaming architecture. All while remaining lightweight and delivering high performance.

Transcoding takes the source video and converts it into multiple versions of the same video in different sizes and qualities, each of which is optimized for viewers with different internet speeds and devices. This ensures the viewers have the most optimized experience no matter where they are.

Your video characteristics like framerate, resolution, rate, keyframe interval and bandwidth are all determined by the encoding. Leveraging the power of the Livepeer decentralized transcoding network, the combination of MistServer and Livepeer creates a full solution for video streaming. This article introduces the Livepeer transcoding network, the available features from the current Mist and Livepeer integration available today, and the required steps needed to set this up.

Livepeer Video Services is a scalable Infrastructure as a Service for developers who want to add live or on-demand video to their project. It aims to increase the reliability of video streaming while reducing costs associated with it by up to 10x. While video transcoding is an important step to ensure high quality viewing experience, it also requires a lot of computation power. This is problematic for most video services, translating to high maintenance cost and complexity.

To achieve cost reduction combined with a resilient platform, Livepeer is building peer-to-peer infrastructure that interacts through a marketplace secured by the Ethereum blockchain. Currently, Livepeer runs enough nodes and total computing power to transcode tens of millions of minutes each week.. For a more detailed and quick primer on Livepeer, please refer to https://livepeer.org/primer

The MistServer Livepeer integration (MistProcLivepeer) leverages the Livepeer network for video transcoding. This removes the transcoding bottleneck, allowing MistServer to handle hundreds of transcoded video streams concurrently.