Injecting AMF onTextData into a VOD RTMP stream?

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Howdy folks,

I am using JW Player to play VOD MBR streams via AMLST. My source files are F4V and have no captions embedded, rather they are in a database. I am interested in injecting my captions as onTextData events into the VOD stream for RTMP, and converting the events to CEA-608 type captions for HLS viewers. There are examples for injecting onTextData into a live application, but what about VOD? I would think the example might be easily modified to work with VOD but am hesitant to dive in until I know I’m not wasting my time.

Here are the examples I am referring to:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-inject-cue-points-or-metadata

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-closed-captioning-for-live-streaming

If this is indeed possible, any pointers on converting the sample code to work in live app space would be well appreciated!

Thanks!

Dylan

2

Hi, Dylan,

Wowza can record cuepoints and metadata that are injected into a live stream that is being recorded, but Wowza cannot inject data into an existing file. There are 3rd party tools, e.g. Captionate, that will add cuepoints to files.

Richard

3

Richard is correct regarding injecting into a VOD file.

JWPlayer can use side-car files (separate URL that pulls a caption file to merge it with a VOD asset). I don’t remember which file formats it supports off the top of my head, but you could pull your captions from the database ahead of time, or even as needed and generate this file. Wowza has an HTTP Provider to download side-car files that could them be used to download them to JWPlayer.

Scott

4

Thank for the clarification on that guys!

I was down this rabbit hole after trying to stream RTMP VOD to JW Player 6 along with a WebVTT sidecar file. The captions list event was dispatched, the CC button illuminated, but no captions appeared, so I suspected JW Player might be ignoring sidecar files when its file source was SMIL. Nope. The fix was to feed JW Player a SRT instead:confused:. Now VOD captions are working in Winders, iOS and even some recent Android devices I was able to test.

Now I can focus on live services (looking forward to upcoming JW/Wowza/Live Webinar)!

Thanks again!

Dylan