livepeer/go-livepeer v0.5.6 on GitHub

Summary

This release includes a critical fix for a bug that could cause orchestrators to advertise prices different from the prices that they expect payments to be based upon. All orchestrators should upgrade to this version as soon as possible to ensure that they can transcode streams reliably and be paid correctly.

This release also includes a breaking change that will require all node operators to start their nodes with a -ethUrl flag and the JSON-RPC URL of an Ethereum node. Please refer to the "Breaking Changes" section for more details and instructions for upgrading to this version smoothly.

Other notable updates in this release include a big boost in GPU transcoding performance, improved filtering of faulty orchestrators during discovery for broadcasters and support for transcoding MP4 inputs/outputs.

Thanks to everyone that submitted bug reports and assisted in testing!

Breaking Changes 🚨🚨

As of this release, a node started without the -ethUrl flag will no longer use a default Infura endpoint when connecting to Rinkeby (using the -network rinkeby flag) or mainnet (using the -network mainnet flag). When the node connects to Rinkeby or mainnet, the -ethUrl and the JSON-RPC URL of an Ethereum will be required. Refer to this guide for instructions on connecting to an Ethereum node.
- The reasons for this breaking change are:
  - At the moment, there are no restrictions on usage for the default Livepeer Inc. sponsored Infura endpoints and as the number of requests increase the higher the subscription costs for maintaining these endpoints. Furthermore, there are request caps for each pricing tier, so high usage from any individual node operator can reduce the number of requests available to other node operators at a given tier. See this blog post and pricing guide for more details on how Infura pricing works
  - While there is a free tier for Infura, the cap for the number of requests for these endpoints is not very high so the per day request cap will be hit pretty quickly if all node operators are sharing the same endpoints. At this point, node operators would need to find alternate methods of connecting to an Ethereum node
- There will be a one week grace period before the default Infura endpoints in the node will stop working so all node operators should upgrade to this version during this time and connect to an Ethereum node using the guide mentioned above

Features

General

Removed the default Infura endpoints for the -ethUrl flag (#1448)

Broadcaster

Added a per-stream orchestrator suspension list that is used during discovery to filter out orchestrators that have returned errors which should improve the broadcaster's ability to find reliable orchestrators (#1435)
Added support for transcoding MP4 inputs/outputs when using HTTP ingest (#1429)
- Check out the docs for more details on how to transcode MP4 inputs/outputs
Added support for enabling and disabling HTTP ingest (#1446)
- Check out the docs for more details on how to enable and disable HTTP ingest
Added additional logging when an error is encountered while submitting a segment to an orchestrator (i.e. if the broadcaster is missing a deposit or reserve) (#1430)

Orchestrator

Enabled filtergraph persistence in between segments during GPU transcoding. This update results in roughly a 30% performance gain when using a GPU to transcode a 1080p input into 720p, 576p, 480p and 360p outputs (#1444)
- With this update, the transcode job serialization introduced in v0.5.5 is no longer needed (as it was a temporary solution for sub-optimal GPU transcoding performance) so that code has been removed

Bug Fixes

General

Fixed an invalid ticket creation round error caused by a broadcaster and orchestrator having different views of the latest Ethereum block. This issue is resolved by having broadcasters set the ticket creation based on the expected ticket creation round advertised by orchestrators (#1428)
Fixed a bug that caused livepeer_cli to crash when connecting to a node running in off-chain mode due to incorrect parsing of the chain ID used by the node (#1455)

Orchestrator

Fixed an overflow bug that could cause an orchestrator to advertise a price different from the price that it expects payments to be based on (#1450)
- This resolves the invalid ticket recipientRand error that many orchestrators have been observing in their logs when transcoding streams
Fixed a potential race condition bug that could have caused an orchestrator to advertise a price different from the prices that it expects payments to be based on (#1453)
Fixed a nil pointer error triggered when an orchestrator receives a segment/payment from a broadcaster before an in-memory cache used for validation is populated with the latest Ethereum block (#1425)

Full list of changes

Verifying Release

md5 hashes for release binaries:

livepeer (Linux): ee078a01c762643ba9ab593a36166d44
livepeer_cli (Linux): 21f0296f689d3e5af5d986fcf4727b89
livepeer (Darwin): e44af1510588766031d938a51fd9a697
livepeer_cli (Darwin): 6bf5975781ccba3135877fdf4de30935
livepeer.exe (Windows): c316f91cc0cfc2d7f3b80c15f834e853
livepeer_cli.exe (Windows): d95bd8dddd328abdf4fc84e1696459d2

Generate the md5 hash:

md5sum livepeer
md5sum livepeer_cli

sha256 hashes for release binaries:

livepeer (Linux): 19db1c45ef4e1a6dbdf2cbb88b95faae456d96e838c0eb59425d084d26252eb7
livepeer_cli (Linux): c6fb76cd2d82cdb2241b1a7786f59edf810d4dcc07d1087f09963f4e91c2f80c
livepeer (Darwin): 3b3c1b8e24b4667086e7958084579e0de8084a09268d5080f1f99e0be6eb2c8b
livepeer_cli (Darwin): 25295d815736f1aecd385b7778e0e47432fcf4d707df2394eb087f368934d8bf
livepeer.exe (Windows): f6754a292f9a0165f2d1bdb189518f21e5f009d90518e225340d534d04722c3b
livepeer_cli.exe (Windows): e300fa37d981393e0bb2d1451381a21df745d6217f741a43e2b00b6c43950015

Generate the sha256 hash:

shasum -a 256 livepeer
shasum -a 256 livepeer_cli