Cloudflare Releases Streamline for Custom Video Pipelines
Cloudflare has launched Streamline, a new developer playground designed to showcase how developers can build continuous, long-running video processing pipelines using its developer platform.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Introduction to Streamline and Bespoke Video
Cloudflare Stream serves as a powerful broadcasting platform for numerous clients, yet rendering dynamic annotations on a livestream or generating alternate versions of hosted videos with burned-in subtitles requires custom video pipelines. To address this need, Cloudflare announced a new developer playground called Streamline.
The release demonstrates how developers can construct systems to deliver bespoke video experiences on Cloudflare's Developer Platform by leveraging Workers, Containers, and various media protocols to modify video feeds and immediately publish outputs as livestreams or new hosted videos.
Architectural Design and Core Components
Video processing pipelines demand durable, long-running environments capable of executing specialized compiled code with predictable memory and CPU capacity. Because video streams can run for extended periods, the media process requires an independent lifecycle separate from the initial request.
To achieve this, Streamline pairs Containers for long-lived media processing runtimes, Durable Objects for orchestration, and Workers for control signaling and monitoring. The architecture consists of a media engine running inside a container alongside a controlling application built with Workers.
Media Engine and Controlling Application
The media engine handles media input, output, and processing. It features a control harness written in Go that acts as an HTTP server to translate incoming requests into operations executable by the media engine, which currently implements FFmpeg as an internal detail.
The engine can pull RTMPS playback from a Stream Live input, publish RTMPS output to another Stream Live input, pull Cloudflare Stream HLS manifests, accept webcam inputs, and publish preview video over an outbound WebSocket to a Durable Object relay.
Session Management and Lifecycle Control
Once a controlling Worker application initiates a session, it can safely disconnect and reconnect while the container continues processing. To prevent instances from running indefinitely without external oversight, a maximum duration is enforced.
Normally, Cloudflare Containers automatically sleep after defined periods of inactivity. Streamline overrides the onActivityExpired() callback to ensure continuous processing even when the controlling application disconnects and receives no incoming requests.
API Packages and Local Development
Cloudflare exports specific packages to provide a high-level session-based API and a Durable Object base class associated with the container. These components route API requests, implement the preview relay server, and offer hooks for security and access policy.
Developers can also run the system locally during development using a local Docker instance without requiring a Durable Object or complex authorization controls, making testing straightforward.
Sources
- Cloudflare BlogStreamline: custom video pipelines with Cloudflare Stream and Workers
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