PIP two live video streams

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I hope this is not too off topic. I’m looking for ways to implement PIP (Picture-In-Picture) feature in a live streaming application. Let’s say I’ve two live streams, A & B. I think there’re two possible approaches:

  1. Find a video mixer that mixes the two live video into PIP layout and send to the streaming server as a single video stream

  2. The client application pulls two live streams from the streaming server and the client app lays the PIP (secondary) video over the main video

Approach 1 should not occupy extra bandwidth between the camera & the streaming server but may introduce significant delay in the video. Approach 2 will double the bandwidth but shouldn’t introduce additional delay to the video.

Suggestions & comments are grealy appreciated!

Thanks,

Bruce

2

Bruce,

I think option 2 is much better, because a key feature of the PIP is switching between streams, and this would be much easier and much faster in option 2.

Richard

3

Sounds like a good solution. Wirecast is great for that kind of thing.

Richard

4

Not at present. I think this may be a future feature of Wowza Transcoder (composite), but I don’t have a time frame.

Richard

5

Krishna,

I think this is a possible future feature of the Wowza Transcoder, but I do not have a time frame for that. Meanwhile there is not a very satisfactory way of replaying two live streams in sync. I have heard of a VLC add-on called Mosaic that might be useful but I have not used it.

Richard

6

Hi Richard,

You may be correct. I just tried using Wirecast to do PIP with two video sources, combine it as one stream and publish it to Wowza. The video latency is about 5 seconds from the client end. This is 2-3 seconds more than the my normal lantency.

Nevertheless, Wirecast is very easy to use and allows a beginner like me to easily add cool video effects to the stream.

Thanks,

Bruce

7

Just an udpate for those who are interested in Wirecast, I was able to get the latency down to 2-3 seconds. I set the encoding setting for resolution & frame rate to be the same as my input sources and that solved it.

I was running everything from my laptop which is equipped with 2GHz T7200 with 2 GB ram. I guess even this is not powerful enough for the job.

Thanks,

Bruce

8

Is it possible to PIP on the Wowza side using the Transcoder AddOn?

9

Hi Richard,

This question is asked a long time back.

I have two streams to same application from two different publishers, i want to overlay 2nd stream on 1/4th portion of 1st stream and save the resultant on server-side.

To show 2 streams to user in overlayed fashion, am using flash to play and overlay 2nd stream over 1st stream. But the problem is to save two streams on server-side as the way user watches them(overlayed).

so I want do PIP on server using transcoder addon and record the file. is it possible now?

If not possible what are my options?

Krishna

10

Is Wowza streaming server any closer to this capability?