This article talks about an example setup for using Television Simulator with one or more live-streaming video sources. You’ll use a virtual machine with Docker to make this work, either on your LAN or over the web and setup subdomains using HTTPS to make everything maximally compatible. Videos that you want to play 24/7 will be stored on the server and played, one at a time, per channel, on a loop.

Prerequisites

• Linux machine with Docker installed
  • I’m using a Droplet from DigitalOcean (2 GB Memory / 2 AMD vCPUs / 25 GB Disk) and I’m running two channels right now. Roughly 40% of the VM’s CPU is in use at any given time.
  • I’m using Ubuntu Server as well but any Linux you’re familiar with will do for this tutorial.

<aside> 🐢

A single CPU virtual machine will not work as it’s just not sufficient to run. I’ve tried.

</aside>

• Domain name under your control
  • Ability to set DNS records and obtain an SSL certificate (through Lets Encrypt or otherwise)

stateDiagram-v2
	state "nginx proxy manager\\n{your IP}:443" as npm
	state "docker-static-website\\n{your IP}:8101\\nServes /var/channels/ch1/www" as sw
	state "Television Simulator\\n{your IP}:8087" as tvs
	state "ffplayout for channel 1\\nPublishes to /var/channels/ch1/www" as ffp
  [*] --> npm: Web request
  npm --> tvs: tvs.example.com
  npm --> sw: ch1.example.com
  sw --> ffp
  

Docker

Managing Docker itself

I find it easiest to use Portainer CE. It’s a free program and provides a GUI, monitoring, and the ability to work with Docker via the web.

Install Portainer CE with Docker on Linux | Portainer Documentation

I deployed each Docker Compose file as its own Stack in portainer, which allows you to restart and manage the static web server as well as ffplayout simultaneously.

Docker Compose template for Nginx Proxy Manager

Follow the tutorial here to set up Nginx Proxy Manager

Nginx Proxy Manager

  app:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
      - '81:81'
    volumes:
      - /var/npm/data:/data
      - /var/npm/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt

Docker Compose template for ffplayout

<aside> 🛠

You’ll need to build the Docker image for ffplayout yourself since it isn’t available on Docker Hub. Visit this repository and download the Dockerfile and ffplayout_{version}.deb and run docker build -t ffplayout . in the directory you downloaded it at. This will make an image tagged as ffplayout you can use in your channels.

</aside>

services:
  ffplayout:
    container_name: ffplayout-ch1
    image: 'ffplayout:latest'
    volumes:
      - "/var/channels/ch1/ffplayout.yml:/etc/ffplayout/ffplayout.yml"
      - "/var/channels/ch1/logs:/logs"
      - "/var/channels/ch1/video:/video"
      - "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"
      - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro"
      - "/var/channels/ch1/www:/live"
    restart: unless-stopped
  webserver:
    image: lipanski/docker-static-website:latest
    depends_on:
      - ffplayout
    restart: always
    networks:
      - channel-network
    ports:
      - "8101:3000"
    volumes:
      - "/var/channels/ch1/www:/home/static"
      - "/var/channels/ch1/httpd.conf:/home/static/httpd.conf:ro"

networks:
  channel-network:
    name: ch1-network
    driver: bridge

Docker Compose template for television-simulator