Wowza RTMP multicast support

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi guys,

My scenario is as follows:

Currently i’m working on a setup for a medium sized private high school.

Every morning there is a student-run news show which is broadcasted live to all the classrooms. We have an ATEM 2M/E broadcast switcher, among other things, but that isn’t very important

I need to deliver 720p HD video to all 200~ classrooms using minimal bandwidth.

Right now we are using multicast to deliver the video stream to the classrooms using MMS but I do not want to continue using microsoft smooth streaming as I run into many problems having to install silverlight on every classroom computer.

Ideally, I need a solution that delivers HD video to each classroom, without the classrooms having to install any additional software (They all have flash/html5 supported browsers at least) and not destroy the network.

I already have the latest wowza installed and created a webpage with JW Player to watch the rtmp stream, but when I have more than a few classrooms watch simultaneously, the video gets very choppy and is unwatchable…

I had thought our network could handle the stream since our backbone is all gigabit but apparently not. How would I go about implementing multicast so as to not congest the local network? I know that wowza and rtmp support multicast but I keep reading that neither JW player nor flow player support multicast streaming?

Also please use simple terminology with me, I’m not entirely familiar with how multicast works, I just know that whoever setup the old MMS streaming method enabled multicast throughout the network and that is what we currently use for the MMS stream.

Thanks!

2

Hi,

While Wowza does support multicast, it isn’t the RTMP variety. Wowza supports multicast using RTSP players

such as QuickTime or VLC. There is also multicast support for the Silverlight embedded player.

If this interests you, the Push Publishing article here explains how Multicast publishing can be configured.

Daren

3

If you have a medium sized highschool to serve with a gigabit LAN I don’t think you’re going to get much out of multicast. I wouldn’t see that sort of audience size congesting too much. Adaptive streaming will get you more bang for your buck. Remember also that with multicast the things you can do with a stream are limited. The server and client don’t talk, they just both join a group. Because of this there is no such thing as adaptive bit rate or DVR, returning metrics about the stream quality at the player because significantly more difficult and there is no such thing as packet recovery should network things happen (and they do).

That being said, I have implemented multicast singlesource (which, if your network is a single vlan you could also use anysource multicast) with wowza and it streams like a champ.

You need to follow the push publishing method listed (which became much easier with WSE) and you should be able to pull the stream with VLC by opening RTP://@multicastip:multicastport

Hope this helps.