Hi,
I’m quite a new user of streaming technology and I obviously need some guidance.
I have a Wowza Server running on Amazon. I’m using Wirecast as encoder software and I transmit the recorded stream to the Wowza Streaming Engine using destination “RMTP-server” and address “rtmp://:1935/live”. Encoding format is Flash/x264.
I player I’m using JW-Player and source set to “rtmp://:1935/live/liveStream”.
It works fine in IE, Crome, iPhone and Andoid.
I’m only using live-streaming.
Q1:
I my choice of protocols a bad choice (I can see on the Internet, that some recommend HLS as the best protocol).
Q2:
If I would like to use HLS, do I then need to apply the Transcoder AddOn.
Q3:
Can you recommend some reading that can help me understand the world of streaming-protocols
regards
Michael
Hi Michael,
We’re excited that you’re getting started with Wowza Streaming Engine.
RTMP protocol is excellent for delivery to a desktop browser. The latency is reduced and it works seamlessly with Flash Player. HLS, an HTTP delivery protocol, is designed for iOS (and works with a handful of Android platforms) and is equally a very solid streaming protocol solution. I would suggest that you use JW Player to deliver RTMP as a primary stream with a fallback to Apple HLS when presented with iOS and other user agents that will support that protocol. JW Player offers a great deal of support on the RTMP with HLS fallback workflow on their site.
The Transcoder AddOn is used to modify a live stream to meet particular bit rate (amount of bandwidth required to transport a stream / stream size) and codec requirements. For example, Android devices will not stream with MP3 audio, so it is very common to convert an incoming stream to AAC, as needed. As another example, it is possible to send a high bitrate stream to Wowza and use the transcoder to create multiple low bit rate transcoded streams for lower bit rate delivery (i.e. Low, Medium and High Speeds). The transcoder is generally not required for streaming HLS unless you are using a codec that is not supported by IOS.
Here are some resources that you may find very helpful in getting started with Wowza Streaming Engine:
I hope you find this helpful. Please do continue to ask questions here.
-Tim
Great - just what I needed. Thanx.