Is Wowza a solution for us?

Greetings. My goal here is to determine whether Wowza is a solution for what we’re trying to do. I’ll try to make my description of our aims brief. Thanks for your time.

We make “patient monitoring systems” for hospitals. What that means is we install a camera + computer in each room in a hospital that watches patients and has the ability to deliver an early warning system to nurses that a patient is about to leave their bed. Internally we use machine learning + computer vision to achieve these “smarts” of the early warning.

When a nurse gets a warning about a patient we notify them at their central monitoring station but also on their phones/mobile devices. If the nurse wishes to, he/she may open up a live feed of the room (delivered from the camera + computer we have in each room). Currently this live feed is delivered using RTSP, but we are looking to do so using MPEG DASH (for better player support, etc).

The cameras are Microsoft Kinects (3D cameras “depth” cameras) and so we have a bunch of custom software to read from these cameras + analyze what we’re reading. What would be ideal is to simply take the frame data that we’re getting from these cameras and deliver them to the Wowza server and let it handle all of the MPEG DASH stuff + connection pooling + networking, etc. In short, we’d rather not invent a whole new server solution and just extend an already rock solid one with modules or whatever that just grabs whatever frame data we want to deliver and delivers it on our behalf so we can focus on our main product offering and not get bogged down writing server code.

So my question is this: can we use Wowza as the server in this high level picture I just described? If we have a camera and a computer in many hospital rooms, can we run Wowza on each of these machines, extend it to read video data from these specialized cameras, and then let it worry about the rest? Or is this a use case that isn’t common or well supported?

Thanks for your time!

Hi,

As SiggDev mentions, we require the source to be in a particular compatible format as listed on the provided specifications page. Again as mentioned, you may be able to use an intermediary such as ffmpeg which can then restream to Wowza.

Regards,

Paul

Wowza is capable of handling all the mpeg dash stuff, however capturing the frame data is not possible out of the box, just as you assumed. Actually I’m not sure it’s possible at all, even with a custom module. Wowza has specific input format requirements and if the data is not in that format - wowza can’t use it directly.

There are some examples in these forums where we can see discussion about using raw h.264 byte stream without a supported container, but this is still different from your case because that stream is already properly encoded.

I think this is not possible without an external tool, though I would like if somebody from Wowza would confirm this.

If you’re open to a solution with an external tool, it may be possible to use ffmpeg to capture the frame data and stream it to wowza in a supported format. A quick search on this topic put out some discussion about using kinect with ffmpeg, although I haven’t done it myself.

what about transcoding from rtsp to whatever (about your need of better player support). wowza can do that.

or i didn’t get the point…hope it helps