Feature Suggestion - HTML5 overlays

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello,

I’m not sure if this even can go here, but here goes:

We are currently using Wowza Streaming Engine as a hub to distribute premium sports content to multiple partners in multiple formats. It works perfectly and has been a game changer within our organization, as we operate on a “streaming first” and “cloud first” mindset.

Which brings me to a suggestion that would make it even more valuable.

We are in talks with flowics to use their online web-based CG solution for scoreboards, timers and pretty much every graphic that we insert in our broadcasts. Their solution generates a dynamic HTML5 output that we are currently overlaying on top of our broadcasts using vmix. While this works great, it would be an excellent feature if we could somehow overlay this HTML5 output on Wowza.

I don’t know, honestly, if that’s even possible from a developer standpoint, though i thought it would be a good idea to suggest.

Regards

2

I’ve done some research on this and spent quite some time investigating the options and doing tests. The approach that made most sense to us eventually, was the use of a headless Chrome client that renders the HTML5 and then let Wowza take snapshots from that every n frames. This is pretty much how OBS Studio does it when you select a web page as a source.

We came as far as actually implementing the overlay but had some struggles with the alpha layer. Nothing that can’t be solved, but then the project got canceled.

I don’t think Wowza will ever implement this into their Transcoder feature. This is purely IMHO, because I’m not a Wowza employee so I can only guess their plans. But WSE is primarily a media server and not so much for producing. There are other software packages who offer a complete solution (e.g. Dazzl). Alternatively you could also put OBS in front of Wowza and add the HTML5 overlay there …

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