Pointer needed on streaming players

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Howdy,

We have been using Wowza 3 for several years now with great success, currently upgrading to 4. I have our destruction letter being processed and the new server is up and running, tested against our website and all is working. We should move to the new server in the coming weeks.

We currently use Wowza to play the videos from our city meetings.

http://www.greenfieldin.org/government/city-council/1273-council-sept-9-2015

And to publish a few live views of the city.

http://www.greenfieldin.org/residents/current-conditions/beckenholdt-park

What we need to do now is to move away from a flash requirement to play videos from the website. We would like to support multiple player options with a flash requirement as the last fall back of other methods are not available. Chrome video is popular as are phones and tablets, even in a small town like ours people know what Silverlight is. I cannot seem to find clear instructions/tutorials on code or a product that will enable me to provide a single page that will choose the best possible player.

Can someone point me to a “Video player support for dummies” where I might be able to learn the process and maybe be able to ask intelligent questions?

Thanks,

DAve

2

Hello Dave,

Wowza Streaming Engine supports multiple streaming protocols. The trick is to make sure that the different players used by the playback clients are connecting to the right streaming URL. These player will need to connect to a playback URL that is using the streaming protocol supported by that particular player. Usually, when streams are being played back through a website, there is a simple Javascript running which will check the User-Agent of the client connecting to that website, and based on that User-Agent determine which device has loaded that particular web page. Knowing the device’s streaming capabilities, you can then include a logic which will present the correct playback URL for that device.

Here is a nice article which can help you with “Understanding streaming protocols and output file formats”. Also, here are several articles describing how to play back different stream formats provided by Wowza Streaming Engine (Wowza Example Players).

Ian Beyer has a nice blog post providing a sample “Browser-Aware Player Code”.

I hope this helps.

Zoran

3

Thank you, that is exactly what I was looking for. I will check those links out later today.

DAve