Introduction
A Publishing Point defines how CDNsun receives your live source stream. It is the ingest side of your CDN HTTP Live service, which means it decides how the source enters our platform before it is delivered to viewers. In practice, this is where you decide whether CDNsun should pull the stream from your side or whether your encoder or origin should push it to ours.
Once the Publishing Point is created, you can use it as the Origin Publishing Point for one or more CDN HTTP Live services. Those services are responsible for delivery, while the Publishing Point remains responsible for ingest. Keeping that distinction in mind makes the live streaming workflow much easier to understand.
How a Publishing Point works
A Publishing Point sits between your source and the CDN delivery layer. Your encoder, media server, storage, or upstream streaming server provides the source stream, and the Publishing Point makes that source available to CDNsun for delivery. It does not describe how viewers watch the stream, it describes how CDNsun receives it.
The two most important ideas on this page are pull and push. With pull, our Publishing Server connects to your origin and fetches the stream from your URL or domain. With push, your encoder or origin actively sends the stream to our Publishing Server or to CDN Storage.
In practice, you usually choose the method that matches how your source is already produced. If the source already exists as HLS or DASH files, an HLS-based workflow is often the natural choice. If your encoder already outputs RTMP, an RTMP-based workflow is usually the most direct one.
Streaming terms used on this page
A few terms appear repeatedly in live streaming documentation, so it is helpful to define them clearly:
- HLS - HTTP Live Streaming, a segmented HTTP-based streaming format that typically uses .m3u8 playlist files and .ts segment files.
- RTMP - Real Time Messaging Protocol, commonly used as a contribution protocol between a live encoder and an ingest server.
- Pull - CDNsun fetches the source stream from your infrastructure.
- Push - your infrastructure uploads or sends the source stream to CDNsun.
- Transcoding - converting an input stream into another delivery format or bitrate profile.
Choose the right input method
The main question is not which method sounds more advanced, but which one matches your real workflow. Each input method reflects a different way the source stream is produced and handed over to CDNsun.
- HLS Pull - use this when your origin already publishes an HLS stream on your own domain or server and you want CDNsun to pull it from there. DASH is also supported.
- HLS Push - use this when you want to upload your HLS stream to CDN Storage and let CDNsun deliver it from there. DASH is also supported.
- RTMP Push - use this when your live encoder can publish directly to our Publishing Server. CDNsun receives the RTMP stream and transcodes it to HLS for delivery.
- RTMP Pull - use this when your source is already available as an RTMP stream on your side and you want CDNsun to pull it from the RTMP URL and transcode it to HLS.
If you are mainly deciding between pull and push, use a very simple rule: with pull, the connection is initiated from the CDN side, and with push, it is initiated from your side. That one distinction often makes the right choice obvious.
Create a Publishing Point
After you know which input method fits your workflow, creating the Publishing Point is straightforward. Most of the work is really in choosing the correct method and filling in the source details correctly.
- Go to Services/Publishing Points.
- Select your desired Publishing Server.
- Select the Input method that matches your workflow (HLS Pull, HLS Push, RTMP Push, or RTMP Pull).
- Fill in the remaining form fields. These depend on the selected input method and usually define where the source stream is located or where it should be sent.
- Click the Create Publishing Point button.
- Use the new Publishing Point as the Origin Publishing Point when creating your CDN HTTP Live service.
Input-specific notes
A few details depend on the selected method and are worth keeping in mind when preparing your source stream:
- For RTMP Push, transcoding to a multi-bitrate HLS stream is supported.
- For RTMP Push, to allow publishing from all IP addresses, use the single-line entry 0.0.0.0.
- For RTMP Push and RTMP Pull, the origin stream must be in MP4 or FLV container format and encoded with the H.264 video codec and AAC or MP3 audio codec.
- For HLS Push and HLS Pull, the service expects .ts segment files and .m3u8 playlist files.
- For HLS-based Publishing Points, DASH is also supported.
What next?
Read about the following topics.