Trying to understand "transrate"

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi all

So I run a small community funded live streaming site.

We have a good amount of users and average 5-10 concurrent live streams but we can get 20 or so people streaming some times.

Problem is we are needing a way for low bandwidth limited viewers to watch as well as mobile users to be able to view streams via HLS.

(iOS needing a certain resolutions to work?)

As we are a small site we don’t have powerful servers to live transcode streams.

I saw in a NAB video this year one of the Wowza people talked about “transrate” rather than transcoding.

I see there is some documentation on this in this site but I don’t use Wowza all the time, I use it for event streaming.

What I need to know is if this “transrate” can be done out of Wowza on FFMPEG or equivalent and if it is changing the resolution and bitrate but not needing high amounts of CPU power?

Thanks

2

Hi,

Traansrate is reall a terminology for providing a different bitrate, and perhaps resolution, rendition f a live stream. It’s still re-encoding the video stream and takes about the same CPU cycles as

the transcode process does.

There are some encoders out there, such as FMLE, that can provide more than one bitrate version of a stream (perhaps a high and low) before reaching Wowza. Wowza can then ingest those streams

and provide the various protocols as needed. This merely shifts the transcoding to the head, or source, end so you still need a system with sufficient power to run the encoder, but that can be a good laptop

or desktop PC. FFMPEG could also be used, but would have similar CPU requirements for the same process.

Daren