Streaming cloud, VLC playback latency is around 40 seconds

Wowza Video (Formerly Streaming Cloud)
1

I’m currently testing the Wowza streaming cloud as a trial user to see if it’s feasible to stream in low latency to thousands of clients.

We have a simple set-up with VLC broadcasting a web-cam into Wowza and VLC playing back the RMTP stream.

We can see that the ingress is fine (Wowza shows the video thumbnail as a few seconds behind the live video), however when we view the output RMTP stream via VLC we see about 40 seconds delay.

We’ve also noticed that the playback and hosted page video players show about 12 seconds latency…

Is this expected? I followed the instructions to enable low-latency but regardless of the various options (and hours of tinkering with other options) we’re unable to improve that.

From our research the VLC player is receiving a chunklist of several TS files; and begins playing at the very start (hence 40 seconds behind), whilst the Wowza hosted page ignores 90% of the chunklist and appear to play the ~last chunk, giving around 12 seconds latency.

Any help in cutting down the latency would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

James

2

Thanks for the question @James Hunter and I have a couple of questions for you. Have you considered our ultra low latency option through Cloud? You would use the Wowza Player for playback because ultra low latency streams need to go through a web sockets player. I’m not sure if VLC fits that description.

But, in this case, you can ingest from your RTMP stream source and Wowza Streaming Cloud will convert and deliver the ultra low latency stream target via a websocket player. You can potentially achieve sub-3-second latency this way and autoscale for delivery around the globe.

Keep in mind that with the Cloud trial, you do have access to ultra low latency, but there is a limit to ten consecutive viewers per stream. So, you could run a test to achieve your low latency and always purchase a Cloud license to deliver the stream to thousands of viewers.

In addition, you have the option to enable HLS fallback for viewers on iOS mobile phones with a slightly higher latency than 3 seconds, but you’d reach more of audience.

Here are the docs on how to approach this workflow and run some ultra low latency tests:

  1. https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-connect-an-rtmp-encoder-to-wowza-streaming-cloud-with-ultra-low-latency

  2. https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-wowza-ultra-low-latency-test-player-to-play-ultra-low-latency-streams

I hope this helps you, be sure to let me know and we can continue to work together if you require additional assistance- Rose

3

Thanks Rose! I had the same question and going to try to work through your solutions