Hi everyone
We’ve been using S3 as an image dump for our web gallery for a while now and its been a revelation for us. The pay as you go usage is fantastic.
I’m hoping that EC2 can help us out with our next project. Took me a while to get my head round what EC2 actually was, but I gather it’s basically a rented VM where you pay for whatever you use. Sounds perfect!
Every year we host an event and last year we had a pair of webcams, but at this years event I had them set to just FTP upload a snapshot every 5 seconds or so.
It works ok, but for 2009 I’d like to have live video webcams running.
The webcams are Axis 207W IP cameras, and I can send the stream to remote servers using Flash Media Encoder or Windows Media Encoder.
We are also looking to do a 4 hour live camcorder broadcast of the final awards ceremony, and again we can stream this to the internet using Flash Media Encoder. During this we will probably turn off the webcams to ensure bandwidth is good for the camcorder upload.
Ideally I’d like to use Flash because the end user experience is better.
I did look at using a service like Mogulus (which uses AWS on the back-end I think) but the pricing levels they offer aren’t clear, and they don’t offer a pay as you go sort of usage.
The webcams and streaming will only be live for the duration of the event, 12 days absolute max, so it doesn’t seem worth taking out a whole monthly subscription account.
Also we won’t be using any storage for any of this.
I think most of the CPU intensive stuff will be done at our end, by the computers that will be transcoding the MJPEG/video streams and uploading to Wowza.
What I’m looking to achieve is that we’re only uploading one copy of each stream, then the streaming server handles the distribution to multiple users.
So I’d like to look into doing it ourselves rather than relying on a 3rd party service.
My questions:
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Is this something that Wowza EC2 will let us achieve?
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Would we need a separate Wowza instance/subscription for each camera?
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How many outgoing/viewer streaming connections can a Wowza instance handle?
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Is there any way we can estimate whether we need Large or Extra Large Wowza or high-cpu AMI instances?
Or will it just be a case of trial and error testing.
- Is there a way we can change a Wowza AMI instance from Large to Extra Large, or to high-cpu while we’re live if we need to?
When we broadcast the awards ceremony, the usage will be higher than with the webcams
- With Wowza EC2 prices mentioned on this page… https://www.wowza.com/ec2.php
Do we have to pay Amazon EC2 fees in our AWS account on top of those prices?
- The final piece of the jigsaw then is having a Flash player embedded into our website which connects users to the streams from the AMI. Anyone got any suggestions?
Anyone have any advice on this?
Is there anything that I’ve missed here?
Is all this possible with Wowza on EC2?
I really hope so, as the “pay for what we use” method will definitely be the cheapest option. We only need to have this set up for a couple of weeks, and a bit of testing.
Thanks, Ben