HTML5 Video with Wowza VOD - sample.mp4

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello,

I am new to the Wowza and have many questions.

I’m trying to test if Wowza has been configured correctly and if it is possible to play the sample.mp4 using the HTML5 video tag with on demand streaming on Firefox in Windows 7. We are using the Wowza Streaming Engine 4 Perpetual Pro Edition 4.5.0 build18676.

I have read the HTML5 documentation at https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-play-video-using-the-html5-video-tag and have searched the forums and was wondering if I can play the sample using a video tag using Wowza, since all major browsers support H.264. Using that code I can see the video with Safari for iOS and OS X. I also noticed that this documentation was written about a year ago and was wondering if more browsers are supported.

Without Wowza, most browsers can play the sample file directly from a folder on our faculty web server such as http://faculty.utrgv.edu/luis.materon/test/html5/html5-3.htm.

We would like to avoid Flash and JW Player if possible. Which player would you recommend if native HTML5 is not possible? I was thinking the included MPEG DASH player might be better than one of the others cost-wise on https://www.wowza.com/docs/specific-player-technologies.

I was able to view the file using the mp4 using the beta version of the player of the MPEG DASH player. How can I verify that the MPEG DASH player has been set up correctly, such as this page loading? http://media.utrgv.edu/MPEGDASHPlayer/player.html

I also see the video in Firefox using the JW Player Stream Tester – which uses Flash - http://demo.jwplayer.com/stream-tester/ using these sources http://media.utrgv.edu:1935/vod/mp4:sample.mp4/playlist.m3u8 and rtmp://media.utrgv.edu:1935/vod/sample.mp4

Please let me know if you recommend opening a support ticket https://www.wowza.com/support/open-ticket.

Thanks,

Russell

2

Hi Russell,

Responding here as well for other users.

HTML5 playback of HLS streams is currently natively supported on iOS/Safari, OSX/Safari, Edge/Windows 10, and newer Android devices. This is really a browser issue.

You can use the MPEG-DASH protocol instead of HLS, although it may not always have consistent implementation support across different players and devices. You can use either the provided example MPEG-DASH player, or you can use other open-source Dash players such as Google’s Shaka player. There is also a demo Shaka player that you can use for testing.

Michelle