Live stream issues

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

New to Wowza so please bear with me, I’m trying to resolve live streaming issues after having followed/looked at the sample live example.

I have Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder successfully streaming a source to the connected Wowza server.

When I user the example flash RTMP player or a simple webpage I’ve constructed with embedded JWPLAYER configuration the lag between the FMLE output and what is shown on flash players is terrible, as in perhaps 30 seconds. I can successfully stream the FMLE output to a unix box on LAN with RTMP server installed, with a round trip of “PC FMLE output > Unix box RTMP > Unix box webserver page with flash player > PC consumes page with flash player” costing about 500ms of lag (over wireless).

I have a webserver installed on PC, along with Wowza - what IM trying to achieve is less lag by encoding, RTMP serving and playing all on same local PC.

When I create a new stream from scratch a file of same name is created in the Wowza “content folder”. When starting the flash player it plays this file until end (in beginning, perhaps a few seconds). If I refresh the webpage with embedded flash player it starts from the beginning of the stream file i.e. not what is currently being streamed live.

If I stop, disconnect, connect and start stream within FMLE it appends to the end of the existing stream file in the content folder, so launching the webpage with embedded player may for example start showing footage from 30 minutes ago (i.e. beginning of file).

I am trying to take FMLE output and simply consume it, all on localhost - FMLE, Wowza and webserver serving page with player all on local host. I DO NOT have any record settings active in FMLE, I also do not require recording of stream. Effectively I just want to “pass thru” the FMLE stream to a player so that what is being streamed has minimal lag and is teal time as possible, with lag in terms of frames and not lag in seconds.

I have for example set the bufferlength property of JWPLAYER to 0 without success.

Just out of interest what consumes the application.xml file where configuration settings can be changed - is it the Wowza server or the player consuming the stream?

Most grateful for any help/advice, as I am sure this is user error on my part and very anxious to have some success with Wowza.

Thanks!

2

So I came across a very short piece of detail about moving the application.xml file from the /applications/live folder to the /conf/live folder, and that at least seems to prevent a file being created in the content folder, with a stream live broadcast lag of about 1 second.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9953323/wowza-stream-not-live-why

I dont know why doing this should have such an effect and grateful for an explanation.

Still looking to reduce the lag further, have tried the following in the /conf/live/application.xml stream properties:

flushInterval

25

Integer

onFlushNotifyClients

true

Boolean

No noticeable improvement.

Many thanks.

3

Also to add, I do not need audio. I am not encoding audio from FMLE into the stream, I dont know if it’s possible/beneficial to switch off audio as a stream property within the application.xml config?

I also only need to stream to flash play that will be consumed by PC (no ios device).

I have also double-checked - my application.xml in the /conf/live folder has live-lowlatency and I have set the bufferlength of jwplayer to 0.

In FMLE I have set keyframes to “1 second” - lowest option it allows. In output video window in FMLE the latency is very low, super responsive.

Still get lag of approx 2 seconds, hoping to reduce as with tests with another rtmp all in one “encoder/server” I can get a latency of less than 1 second, but the software is not as flexible or customisable as Wowza.