Cyber World is evolving rapidly and now days everyone is coming online. And if you have your own dedicated server chances are that at some point you must have thought of setting up video streaming on your server. Actually this is a good way of making your website look attractive or for any other non-specific reason as well. Video Streaming helps make your website look very much engaging and interactive.
Now let’s come to our main topic “How to setup video streaming on a dedicated server” which honestly speaking is a very easy goal to achieve .You just needs to learn a few things in order to setup video streaming on a Dedicated Server.
Firstly take in mind that your server is not very much different from any ordinary computer. Same as an ordinary computer a server also have ram storage and similar components. But the only main difference is that servers can withstand extremely heavy workloads. They are designed to work continuously for years.
What is a dedicated video streaming server?
Now lets talk a bit about what a dedicated video streaming server is. In simple terms a video streaming server gives out video content over the internet. And any person online with any type of supported device online for example T.V., Mobile Phone, Laptop computer, Personal computer etc. can watch it. The term streaming refers to the actual state of transferring the video over the internet to the client who asked for the video to be played online. In streaming the server it is in a constant state of transferring the data or in our case video to the client. This is very similar concept like drinking water from a water tap where you get a constant flow of water.
There are also some other things you need to consider before jumping to any conclusions. The amount of bandwidth you can have at any given period of time. In case you don’t have high enough bandwidth then you cannot stream out high quality video like 8k or raw footage. The second thing to consider is the amount of data transfer you get per month if you have a limited amount of bandwidth allowance per month then it might be very limiting for you, as if you grow in popularity then you might run in a data transfer shortage. To avoid such circumstances you need to take a unlimited plan so that you never run out of data. And moreover if you have a data transfer cap you will be facing an overly charged bill at the end of month.
There are some other things you should consider as well
Streaming Quality
Streaming Quality matters a lot. The streaming quality can be standard definition or high definition or 4k or maybe even higher in some cases. But all things aside you need to set it up in accordance with all the other factors.
Number of People
This refers to maximum number of simultaneous users at any given period of time. This is very important as the more people starts to watch your videos simultaneously the more load is on your system. And your internet connection is also loaded as well. A lot of people now-a-days tend to limit how many people can view their content simultaneously. This helps them to control the amount of load that streaming puts on their servers.
Storage
The next important thing is the storage essential to store all the video content. This plays an important role as if you run out of the storage you will not be able to store new content. So having a bit extra storage is always a good option. This extra storage serves you as a buffer to rapidly store new data or to replace the old data.
Access
Giving the access to your content privately or opening it to a worldwide audience also determines a lot of things for your usage. If you wish to give access to your content only privately it will use much less data and much less of your server resources. And it will also give you very less server load at any given period of time. But if you decide to give your content access to worldwide audience then it will be very heavily demanding. It will put a lot of load on your server. This will consume a lot more of data per month and will generally end up high cost for you.
How to Stream on a Dedicated Server?
Now when we know about a lot of the things about video streaming on a dedicated server now we need to actually know how to do streaming on any dedicated server. So as we have discussed before servers are not very different from actual computers, the same goes for streaming videos, though it is vastly different but the overall approach is very identical.
Firstly you need to decide what OS you want to use for this purpose. There are majorly two OS platforms for this purpose. The first one is Windows and the second one is Linux.
If you opt to go for windows, all you need to do is to connect you pc with your server via remote desktop connection. And use any third party application like Jellyfin or any other similar software’s which suite you well.
The second option in our list is Linux Distros. As we all know there are a lot of variants of Linux. And the most famous ones of Linux are like Ubuntu which do supports video streaming. All you need to start is to install and configure NaginX. Once you have done it, all you are left with to do is to install and configure OBS studio. OBS is highly reliable software. Once you are done with all this you can essentially start video streaming at any time.
Conclusion
Conclusively we can say that video streaming on any server comes with many common challenges. Which are not much difficult to deal. Once you know about how to solve all these problems you are on your way to success.