HLS stream publishing not working properly with Akamai

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

We want to stream to Akamai from our Wowza servers with HLS ingest (passthrough).

When we used rtmp publishing Akamai created an m3u8 playlist with timestamps to use with their DVR. Like so:

stephen@Stephens-MacBook-Pro  ~   master ●  curl https://mycujoosa1-lh.akamaihd.net/i/sk4053_1@370598/master.m3u8\?start\=1484338525\&end\=1484338605
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=519000,RESOLUTION=426x240,CODECS="avc1.66.30, mp4a.40.2"
https://mycujoosa1-lh.akamaihd.net/i/sk4053_1@370598/index_350_av-p.m3u8?sd=10&start=1484338525&end=1484338605&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1526000,RESOLUTION=854x480,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
https://mycujoosa1-lh.akamaihd.net/i/sk4053_1@370598/index_1000_av-p.m3u8?sd=10&start=1484338525&end=1484338605&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=4029000,RESOLUTION=1280x720,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
https://mycujoosa1-lh.akamaihd.net/i/sk4053_1@370598/index_2000_av-p.m3u8?sd=10&start=1484338525&end=1484338605&rebase=on

The playlist that is generated by wowza and that is published to Akamai (with HLS ingest) has the following result:

stephen@Stephens-MacBook-Pro  ~   master ●  curl https://mycujoohls01-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/263422/stephentesthls_group/playlist.m3u8
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=632867,CODECS="avc1.66.30,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=426x240
https://mycujoohls01-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/263422/stephentesthls_240p/chunklist.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=2067718,CODECS="avc1.77.40,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=854x480
https://mycujoohls01-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/263422/stephentesthls_480p/chunklist.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=6019746,CODECS="avc1.77.41,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=1280x720
https://mycujoohls01-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/263422/stephentesthls_720p/chunklist.m3u8

This works perfectly fine for the streaming but doesn’t result in a DVR enabled playlist. We tried the nDVR feature but that doesn’t result in the correct playlist either although it does save the DVR on the Wowza instance. We don’t want this, we want to use the DVR feature of Akamai.

What do we need to change in Wowza to create the proper playlists with timestamps so the DVR feature in Akamai will work correctly?

2

Hello Stephen,

It sounds like the Akamai DVR may have some requirements for how the stream is published or may require that Akamai create the HLS chunks for this feature to work. I recommend asking the Akamai support team if this is the case as stream itself is working, only the Akamai DVR feature is not which is something they would need to troubleshoot.

Enabling the Wowza nDVR won’t provide nDVR playback from the CDN you’re pushing the streams to, this is for playback from the Wowza Streaming Engine server(s).

Regards,

Jason Hatchett