Wowza liverepeater from CDN as RTMP and output Multicast to clients

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I am investigating the options of using Wowza in order to support the following scenario:

CDN RTMP live stream (input) --> Wowza using LiveRepeater --> Multicast (output) to clients

I have been able to successfully pull in the live Flash RTMP stream from the CDN with LiveRepeater able to connect to Wowza from a Flash player. I am now trying to figure how to output the stream as multicast to the clients. I briefly read about MulticastPublisher which sounds like may be an option but wasn’t sure if I could use both LiveRepeater and MulitcastPublisher together.

I am also wondering what type of client the user would need to use to receive the multicast stream (Windows desktop). Is it possible to use a Flash player or possible a Adobe Flex client? If not what other options do I have for example Quicktime or RealPlayer.

Thanks for any help you can provide. I am really impressed with the Wowza server especially with it being written in Java and the great extendablity it has.

Larry

2

Yes, you can use the live repeater and multicast publish together. You will need to use the stream manager or conf/StartupStreams.xml to start the stream in Wowza so that it keeps running.

You should be able to use QuickTime player or VLC to playback the stream. Real player may work as well. You will not be able to use Flash.

Charlie

3

Larry,

I think this means that multicast is not supported by the network when the player fails-over to RTPTunneling.

Richard

4

Hi Charlie,

Thanks so much for your quick response. I worked on this yesterday and was able to successfully get the LiveRepeater and MulticastPublish stream it out as multicast.

I am having one issue when calling the below URL from quicktime/vlc:

rtsp://[wowza-ip-address]:1935/[application]/myStream?multicastplay

Instead of getting the multicast stream it pulls it in as RTP and I can see in the logs its doing RTPTunneling. If I copy the generated SDP file to another webserver and call it I can successfully get the multicast stream. This isn’t a bad workaround except I realized today that every time the server or stream restarts the SDP file it generates changes.

Is there a different way I am suppose to the SDP file from the Wowza?

Thanks again for all your great help,

Larry

5

Hi Richard,

The network supports multicast and I can successfully receive the multicast stream if I get the generated SDP file by Wowza MulticastPublish module and load it manually into VLC. Is rtsp://[wowza-ip-address]:1935/[application]/myStream?multicastplay the correct URL for VLC to call to get the SDP info that the multicast info is in?

Thanks,

Larry