Streamline: custom video pipelines with Cloudflare Stream and Workers

Cloudflare Stream is a powerful broadcasting platform that, for many of our customers, just works. But what if you wanted to render dynamic annotations on a livestream or create an alternate version of a hosted video with burned-in subtitles? You would need to run a custom video pipeline.

Today, we’re releasing a new developer playground, Streamline, that demonstrates how you can build a system to deliver these bespoke video experiences on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. We’ll walk you through how Streamline leverages Workers, Containers, and several media protocols to modify video — and immediately publish that output as livestream or new hosted video. You’ll also have the opportunity to try it for your projects.

A processing pipeline needs a durable, long-running environment that can run specialized, compiled code with predictable memory and CPU capacity. Video streams can run for minutes or hours, so the media process needs a lifecycle independent of the request that started it. An application should be able to start a pipeline, send its input, inspect it, and stop it without needing to keep a single request open for the entire duration.

Cloudflare provides the primitives we need. Containers are long-lived runtimes suitable for media processing. Durable Objects help with orchestration. Finally, Workers are perfect for control signaling and monitoring.

For Streamline, we built a media engine running in a Container to handle media processing in real-time. The Container is controlled by a Worker exposing control, preview, and testing to an agent or user. Processing will continue even if the Worker disconnects. We've architected Streamline with modular components so that the media engine could be replaced with dedicated encoding products in the future.

A Streamline deployment consists of two components: the Media Engine, which handles media input/output and processing, and a controlling Application, which creates, configures, observes, and stops media sessions.