No Closed Captions on *.f4m live stream, but Closed Captions present on *.m3u8

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I am using a Teradeck Slice to encode a live feed (via SDI input) and send an RTMP stream to my wowza setup running on AWS. I have an standard application setup to receive the RTMP stream and am generating multi-bitrate HDS and HLS streams. I am able to view both the HDS and HLS live streams in the test players that come with wowza 4.2 install, and I am able to see Closed Captions in the Apple HLS test player, but the Adobe HDS player does not show a captions display option. I am able to view the .m3u8 live stream in quicktime with captions, in VLC with captions, and on iOS devices all with Closed Captions. But when I try to play the .f4m live stream in my flowplayer (which is setup to display closed captions and does with other streams) I do not see any closed captions.

According to teradek’s website: https://support.teradek.com/entries/90394736-Closed-Caption-CC-support "CC type supported: EIA-608 and EIA-708

Insertion method: inserting into H.264 SEI, as per SCTE 128-1"

Is Wowza capable of working with captions inserted into an RTMP stream using this method? Why am I am to see captions int the .m3u8 but not the .f4m stream?

I feel like I am missing something simple here but have been over the information found here: https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-closed-captioning-for-live-streaming but still have not been able to get captions to appear in the .f4m stream.

Any insight/direction.assistance into this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

2

Hi,

Wowza Streaming Engine can take the live captions provide in EIA-608 form and convert those to onTextData. onTextData captions will play in supporting RTMP and HDS players.

The Wowza test players themselves do not support these captions.

You will need a player, such as FlowPlayer, in order to show the captions with HDS playback.

Daren

3

Daren_j,

Thank you for your reply; I was able to figure out what I was missing.

Unfortunately I was never good at recognizing when to step away from a problem and come back with fresh look. So after 7 hours of banging my head against this issue I drop the post above in hopes someone might have had similar issues, or may even be able to point out what I was missing.

Then this morning I took one more look at https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-closed-captioning-for-live-streaming and saw that I need to add the com.wowza.wms.timedtext.live.module.ModuleCEA608ToOnTextData module to the application.

Simple as that. I have no idea how or why I missed that the first dozen or so times I looked at that page, but there it was. I added the module, restarted the application and Closed Captions appears like magic in both the .f4m and .m3u8 versions of the live stream.

Thank you,

-n8