Hello, me again, i would like to know what video player use to offer customer change the quality of the video streaming, i mean, i stream at 1080 but some user cant see video at 1080. i would to know how they can change it, or wowza do it by it selft?? thanks.
If you set up a stream with Wowza Cloud, you will by default use the Transcoder that will give you so-called Adaptive Bitrate, so that users who have low-bandwidth internet will still be able to watch the stream. If you want to do it manually, look in the Wowza Cloud panel under Advanced > Transcoder.
It’s also possible to control this via the Wowza Cloud REST API.
but im using ultra low latency, and when my users have bad internet, they dont see low video quality, they have a buffering instead, i dont need buffering, i need low quality video, because with ultra low latency we dont have a Transcoder , thaks
Hi Luis,
In order to deal with reduced bandwidth in HLS, the transcoder must create multiple renditions of the source stream. Typically, the highest rendition is the same as the source (e.g. 1080p). It also creates several others at lower resolutions (e.g 720p, etc.) Then, when the player is fetching the stream, it determines if it can fetch the video quickly enough to playback the video without pausing. If it cannot, the player recognizes this and begins fetching a lower resolution version of the same video that has already been created by the transcoder. The user may notice the change in quality, but playback remains continuous.
With ULL, the goal is to minimize latency, and since transcoding adds latency, the video is just packetized, not transcoded. Instead, the only resolution that is available to the player is the same one that was provided as the source. The player can’t switch to a lower resolution rendition when bandwidth isn’t sufficient, since there isn’t one. It has no option but to buffer. It would be possible to reduce the input quality and this would allow video to stream successfully to lower-bandwidth users, but the tradeoff is that all users would see this reduced-quality stream…not just the ones with limited bandwidth.
There are other methods for delivering low latency at different bandwidths. As announced with the January 2021 sunset of the Ultra Low Latency technology, (see https://info.wowza.com/product-notification-april-2020) Wowza is developing other low-latency technologies, notably WebRTC. This standards-based low-latency technology does not use the method above, and instead the publisher and the viewer can negotiate the stream parameters to allow for streaming over connections of various speeds.
I hope this helps!
Robert