Ingest from File

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello, I’m new here.

I’m converting a large archive to be useful with adaptive bitrates, so I’m wondering what options there are for ingesting the media through the transcoder? My source files are H.264 (hinted quicktime). To ingest them into Wowza must I record a live stream with the transcoder enabled, or is there a way to have them transcoded/rated from the filesystem/shell?

thanks!

George

2

Hi,

You could look at playing in your content into a “live” Wowza app as an MPEG-TS stream using something like [VLC](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-use-vlc-as-a-live-stream-encoder-with-wowza-media-server-mpeg-ts(MPEG-TS) to encode. That will allow you to pass the ingested stream into the Transcoder. Alternatively you can of course just use VLC (or ffmpeg) to do the transcoding at the filesystem level. I think they both have settings to determine bit rate and preserve H.264 output etc.

Paul

3

Hello,

The Wowza Transcoder addon is supported only for Live streaming.

if you want to implement adaptive bitrate streaming, you will need to generate the different bitrate VOD renditions of the same media file using an encoder tool.

You can follow the instructions from the “How to do adaptive bitrate streaming” forum article describing how to do VOD adaptive bitrate streaming.

You need to make sure the different bitrate renditions are properly key-frame aligned in order for adaptive bitrate delivery to work properly.

You can also check out these FFMPEG instructions on creating the key-frame aligned VOD files:

Zoran

4

Hi,

Thank you for sharing your research with us. This information can be useful for lots of Wowza users.

Zoran

5

Thanks Paul. So to confirm, I can transcode the files to the format of the stream files externally from Wowza, and Wowza will be happy to use them in an adaptive streaming scenario (yes?). Are the stream files created by the transcoder from an incoming stream in a special format/segmentation, and if so is there a ready-made ffmpeg incantation that produces it? Sorry if these are newbie questions!

George

6

Thanks Zoran, that helped me a lot.

I can see how to create keyframe aligned renditions with ffmpeg. Do you know of any commercial encoders that might also perform this. I notice Telestream Episode can do most things, but not sure about keyframe alignment. Apple Compressor?, Others? As we have so much media to do, it is worth looking for an automated way to create the renditions.

But considering the other way, to get Wowza transcoder to create the renditions from a live stream, if done this way I think it would be a human process to create the SMIL, play/capture the stream, and name it correctly for VOD.

While I like the idea of using Wowza Transcoder and NVENC to crunch through all the existing media files, it sounds like setting it up to do this will be quite a manual task without getting under the hood with your API.

Thanks for your extensive and helpful documentation.

George

7

Ah, looks like Episode doesn’t do it.

http://forum.telestream.net/forum/messageview.aspx?catid=20&threadid=15328

8

Main concept Enterprise can do it.

And Sorenson Squeeze

http://forum.sorensonmedia.com/forum/content.php?281-Adaptive-Bitrate-Encoding