How to monitor/debug adaptive bitrate switching on Wowza side

I’m trying to debug a problem we’re having with jwplayer6 not performing dynamic bitrate switching using RTMP correctly. I also want to be able to verify that HLS devices are switching bitrates too.

How can I monitor in realtime which bitrate is being fetched by a given stream… all I seem to see in the wowza access log is that a RTMP connection has been opened and is playing. Similarly with HLS streams all I see is that the smil and the playlist have been accessed.

It’s a bit frustrating as if you stream HLS chunks using just apache at least you can see the chunks being read in the apache access_log, but with Wowza streaming over HLS I don’t even get that.

Is it live or vod streaming? What version of Wowza are you using?

Key frame alignment between renditions is a requirement. For live streams you can debug alignment like this:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-debug-encoder-multi-bitrate-keyframe-alignment

For vod you can load them up in the scheduler and stream them live to debug as above. Also for vod, see this article on encoding for ABR:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-encode-video-on-demand-content

You can turn on logging for all chunk creation by adding this Property set to “0” in the Application.xml /LiveStreamPacketizer Properties container (this is the one at the bottom, not at top where live packetizers are set)

<Property>
 <Name>maxChunkLogCount</Name>
 <Value>0</Value>
 <Type>Integer</Type>
</Property>

It’s hard to debug iOS switching. In some case there is evidence in the logs if you look at the rows of a c-client-id. You could use a Silverlight or OSMF debug player to some extent because switching either works or for any of the HTTP stream types.

Silverlight debug player:

http://smf.cloudapp.net/healthmonitor/

OSMF 2:

http://www.osmf.org/dev/2.0gm/setu.html

Richard

Wowza 3.2.5 patch 8 with VoD streaming from a multi bitrate set of MP4 files to RTMP and HLS.

There’s no debug configuration for the cupertino or sanjose packetizers that logs what they are doing in more detail then?