[FFmpeg-user] Producing several quality video streams from one 1080p stream.

[Verachten Bruno]

Hi there,

First of all, sorry for being vague, I don't have ffmpeg command line
options yet, I'm just trying to know if I'm totally mistaken, or if my
idea could be implemented quite safely/easily.

I'm currently thinking of getting rid of YouTube for streaming within
the company I work for (because YT consumes so much bandwidth, and you
have not guarantee whatsoever about the quality, and even not talking
about IP and so on).
I could install big (but kind of old aka free) generic X86_64 servers
in the server room, and using Kaltura on them, or even buy a fine
piece of hardware that would do everything (it would take months to
get the agreement), but I'd like to setup a POC first and foremost.
I know ffserver has been abandoned, so it's out of the picture.

I have lots of tiny and dirt cheap Linux ARM machines that can H.264 encode.
I have machines producing content (which could be RAW, or H.264).
So I thought of having the content producers multicast thanks to
ffmpeg, and the small machines grabbing it, reducing the
bitrate/quality, and then broadcasting to whatever machine could
handle content delivery to the final user. I'm not so sure that's
smart, as most of the video delivery software may want to do the
downgrading by themselves.
The goal of the POC would be to do most of the work on the edge of the
network with ffmpeg (i.e. directly in the conference rooms) so that
the server software could be hosted on the simplest, smallest and
cheapest server with the simplest software possible to multicast.

I suppose there are smarter ways with ffmpeg to get from a 1080p to
lesser quality streams than just multicasting, encoding/downgrading,
broadcasting to a server, and then multicasting.

If you managed to read me until there, would you have any idea or
recommandation?

Thanks.
-- 
Bruno Verachten