Red5 Open Source Live Streaming Media Server

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Red5 Open Source Live Streaming Media Server

Red5 is an open source media server for real time live streaming, delivered as a hardened, ready-to-run image by cloudimg. Launch an EC2 instance and begin ingesting live audio and video over RTMP and RTMPS from encoders such as OBS Studio, FFmpeg and hardware broadcasters within minutes - no manual installation, no configuration scripts, no exposed default credentials.

## Why This Image Over Manual Installation

Installing Red5 from source requires configuring Java, Tomcat, systemd services, a TLS keystore and a reverse proxy - a process that can take hours and leaves security gaps if the default credentials are not removed. This image eliminates that effort. Every instance launches with Red5 running under systemd with automatic restart on failure, an nginx reverse proxy on port 80 keeping the web interface off the public internet, all bundled demo and management credentials removed at build time, a unique per-instance HTTP Basic Auth password generated on first boot, and a self-signed RTMPS keystore ready for encrypted ingest.

## Application Stack

Red5 runs as a Java application under a dedicated service account, managed by systemd. Its HTTP web interface is bound to the loopback address and fronted by an nginx reverse proxy on port 80, so the web surface is never exposed directly. The RTMP and RTMPS media transports are served directly by Red5 for stream ingest and playback. A self-signed keystore is generated at build time so the encrypted RTMPS transport starts cleanly without manual certificate setup.

## Security Hardening

The Tomcat users file is emptied and the realm password dropped at build time, the JMX password is rotated to a per-instance random value, and the web interface is protected by an nginx HTTP Basic Auth gate whose password is unique to each instance and stored only as a bcrypt hash in a root-only file - no shared or baked credential ever ships. An unauthenticated health endpoint is available for load balancer and uptime checks without exposing any admin function.

## Live Streaming Capabilities

Publish a live stream to Red5 with any RTMP encoder and pull it back for playback, or use the encrypted RTMPS transport. The bundled demo applications - a publisher, a simple broadcaster and subscriber pair, a recorder, a bandwidth detector and a chat - demonstrate the streaming and shared object capabilities you build on with your own Red5 applications.

## Open Source Foundation

Red5 is backed by an active open source community and has been used across media, education and corporate communications for over a decade, providing a proven foundation for custom streaming applications.

## Use Cases

• Corporate training and all-hands broadcasts: stream weekly meetings to remote employees via OBS, with recordings stored for on-demand replay.
• Live events and webinars: education platforms and conference organizers self-hosting streams in their own AWS account for full control over latency and data.
• Custom streaming applications: development teams building real time video, shared object or chat features on the Red5 API without depending on a managed service.

## Getting Started

Launch the image, retrieve the per-instance web password with sudo cat /root/red5-server-credentials.txt, open ports 80 and 1935 (and 8443 for RTMPS) in your security group, and point your encoder at rtmp://your-instance-ip:1935/live/your-stream-key. Sign in to the browser landing page at http://your-instance-ip/ as admin with the generated password to reach the demo applications.

## 24/7 cloudimg Support

This product includes cloudimg support services. Our engineers assist with deployment, reverse proxy and TLS termination, restricting and securing the media ports, tuning for concurrency, and building and deploying your own streaming applications.

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