H.264 and multiple streams

Hi,

I am currently working with Red5 and like it, but its H.264 support is so limited that we’re evaluating Wowza for purchase. Wowza is, from all accounts, a much more mature product, and the pricing is reasonable. We have a very specific use-case we need to solve, so hopefully somebody can tell me if it’s easily/quickly possible in Wowza.

We currently take in one H.263 stream and create multiple output streams of varying quality from the one input stream. For instance, we get a 1200kbps stream and publish 1200, 800, 400, and 200 kbps streams for clients of different video qualities to subscribe to. So, the output streams vary in their quality from the highest quality to very low bitrate. We need to support H.264 now, however, and need to do the exact same thing. We would like a relatively smooth transition to get the same thing working in Wowza (i.e. not a significant investment in developer time on top of the Wowza investment) and plan on looking into it with the free version before purchasing the unlimited license.

Is there an easy way to programatically publish a stream in Wowza? And are there libraries that can change the quality of the stream? If not, we can use something like Xuggler to do quality changes, as long as there’s an easy way to programmatically publish streams.

Thanks!

Wowza media server 2 preview 6 supports dynamic streaming. So that is the playback side of this. We do not support on the fly transcoding. We are considering this for a future releas of wow media server but not in the 2.0 initial release timeframe.

Charlie

yeap, really interesting question.

Charlie, can you answer something or refer us to a right direction.

thanks

It is still the case. A lot of things can be done through Java to extend Wowza but are not supported, meaning built-in and supported as a feature of Wowza, for example connecting to a database with JDBC is not a supported Wowza feature, but easy to accomplish in a Wowza module.

VLC is not built-in or a Java extenstion. It is a 3rd party tool and is not supported except that the tutorial is provided and questions are often answered if possible. It does do on-the-fly encoding, which is why it is useful in conjunction with Wowza.

Richard

Wowza media server 2 preview 6 supports dynamic streaming. So that is the playback side of this. We do not support on the fly transcoding. We are considering this for a future releas of wow media server but not in the 2.0 initial release timeframe.

Charlie

A couple of questions, charlie…

  • Is this still the case?

  • What do you mean exactly when you say you don’t support on-the-fly transcoding? Can’t it be done using a Java extension module?

  • What is this thread about if it’s not on-the-fly transcoding?