Castr changelog castr.io

New

*Available in the Livestream 5TB plan and above

By enabling the RTMP Backup Ingest, you can simultaneously stream primary and backup live video feeds. In case your primary stream fails, Castr will immediately switch to your backup stream, so that your live broadcast can continue without interruption.

This is a failsafe solution that makes sure your stream is up and running even when there's a technical malfunction.

Enable this feature by switching the Enable Backup URL toggle in your dashboard. You will find a Primary RTMP URL and a Backup RTMP URL to configure in your encoder.

Learn more in this article

Improvement

We added some new metrics in the Livestream Analytics. With these intuitive updates, you can measure the performance and evaluate the effectiveness of your streams.

New metrics:

• Visitor Overview

• Real-time Visitor Count

• Real-time Map

• Visitors per Country

• Visitors per City

New capabilities:

• Time selection: choose the time range you want to view

• Export data into multiple formats: CSV, XML, HTML, TSV, JSON, and RSS

• Export data as images

Improvement

We made some new enhancements to the Castr HTML5 player:

• Thumbnails on seeking: Hover over the seek bar (or progress bar) to see the preview of the video at seeked time. A must-have for easy video navigation.

• Visual timeline: A filmstrip-inspired navigation bar at the bottom of the video shows you the thumbnails of different frames of your video.

• Playback memory: If you close the video and come back later, it will continue where you left off.

These improvements reflect on all videos in VOD Buckets and Live to VOD converted files. You may access these features in the Livestream plans.

New

If you’re a current user of the Livestream plan, you can now enjoy our VOD Bucket feature. This feature enables you to:

• Upload videos as VOD (video on demand) files

• Embed them to any website with the embed URL or iFrame snippet

To access, go to your dashboard and click on the VOD Bucket tab in the top navigation bar.

New

*Available in Livestream plans as for now.

We replaced the old Recording tab with Live to VOD and added some cool new functions:

• Auto-record: Castr will automatically record your videos as soon as they go live. You don’t have to turn the recording mode on and off.

• Turn a recorded file into a VOD (video on demand) file, with an embeddable HTML5 player link and iFrame snippet.

• Save videos to your local computer as .mp4 files.

Read more:

• Guide: How to use the Live to VOD tab

• Blog: Live to VOD is now available

New

We’ve added an option to stream with the SRT protocol in the Livestream plans (beta).

SRT is an open-source streaming protocol that offers sub-second latency for live videos. SRT was proven to run 12 times faster than the RTMP protocol, and can deliver reliable streams over unreliable network connections.

You can also get the SRT URL in Castr’s Multistream plans.

Learn more in our blog here.

New

For Scheduler and VOD bucket, you can now connect Castr to your Dropbox and Google Drive and import files directly.

New

You can now use SRT URL instead of RTMP URL to connect from your encoder (OBS, Wirecast…) to Castr for a more stable connection and reduced latency.

We no longer support Smashcast as one of our platforms from 19 Nov 2020. If you need to connect to Smashcast, you can use our custom RTMP option to do so.

New

You can now chat with your audience while using Castr Player for livestreaming on your website. Head to our blog to learn more.