PiP created on Server Side?

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

next weekend we will live stream a large Event, the general assembly of the pirate party germany, for who I am providing the streaming servers, running Wowza 3.5.

Now the local camera team came up with a weird idea:

At first it was planned to have the sign language interpreted to be placed as picture-in-picture in the original stream. Now they would like to have the interpreter as seperate stream. I told them this might be a bad idea, after deaf or hearing-disabled viewers with mobile or handheld devices might only be able to watch one stream at a time, and it could be possible that only watching the interpreter without watching the original persons speaking could confuse the meaning. However the local camera team wants to stick to have 2 seperate streams.

So I have one option now: I receive the streams at my office, mix them up again, and upload it as a new stream or, which I am hoping is possible, I mix it up within wowza… (which I doubt is possible, but you can always ask)

So: Is it possible to place a stream in another stream like picture-in-picture, eg using transcoding module?

I’d be grateful for a quick answer :slight_smile:

Thank You

Wolfgang

2

I’m trying to understand your requirements

Event camera == camera1

Sign Camera == camera2

So they are sending to your wowza as 2 separate stream and you need to mix it and restream as 1 stream ?

Maybe you can do something like this

  1. play the incoming stream using Apple Quicktime on 1 dedicated machine, imagine you opening both stream

  2. run Telestream Desktop Presenter

  3. run tele stream wirecast on different machine and add Desktop Presenter as video source

  4. crop each camera and add as a video source eg camera1, camera2

  5. use the PiP template provided by Wirecast and use camera1 as primary video and camera2 as secondary overlay video

  6. stream the final mixed video to you Wowza CDN for publishing

3

Hi Wolfgang,

You cannot overlay a video over another video but you can do dynamic overlays with bmp, png, jpg or text so technically, you could use a motion jpg source as an overlay.

https://www.wowza.com/docredirect.php?doc=tutorialsTranscoderOverlays

4

Or the ability to change input RTMP stream so I can do web based switching

Without hijacking the thread, you could create a server side stream using the publisher api and feed that into the transcoder.

5

I am aware on how to do that locally with receiving the two streams and mix them up. I would do that using Vidblaster, I guess there are many ways performing this.

I was wondering if I I could do the mixing within wowza, using transcoding, after transcoding already allows setting an image in a stream, so I was wondering it you could use that to place a stream in a stream :slight_smile:

6

I am aware on how to do that locally with receiving the two streams and mix them up. I would do that using Vidblaster, I guess there are many ways performing this.

I was wondering if I I could do the mixing within wowza, using transcoding, after transcoding already allows setting an image in a stream, so I was wondering it you could use that to place a stream in a stream :slight_smile:

I’ve tested wowza transcoding but only with image. Would be nice if wowza can do things like that :smiley:

Or the ability to change input RTMP stream so I can do web based switching

7

I’m a little late to this thread, but I was going to explore the idea of using Xuggle (Java library) to do a composite stream in Wowza. From the API, it looks doable. Definitely easier to just do it with a tool like Wirecast, but it’s nice to be able to do things like this on the server too. More and more, I find that live event streaming is easier when the crew on the ground has less to do.