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video-streaminghttp-live-streamingwowzawowza-transcoder

Streaming video playlist to Wowza application

I have successfully setup a Wowza server and I'm able to stream live videos from Wirecast to Wowza with no problems. That's great, but I face the challenge of finding a software or application that would stream a series of videos to Wowza none stop.

I have tried VLC player but I'm unable to figure how to send the stream to my Wowza server.

I also tried the playlist function in Wirecast which worked fine but would not allow me to shuffle the videos.

Any suggestion or idea on how to accomplish this task?

Solution

  • There's a couple of methods that you can use to shuffle through a list of VOD files.

    1. You can use ffmpeg or VLC to select a file and stream it as RTMP or RTSP to your Wowza server. You will need to build in code to populate the file name to be streamed. However, it may not create a smooth transition between VOD files.

      Here's a very simple example of using ffmpeg to stream a VOD file as RTMP.

      ffmpeg -re -i [filePathAndName]  -c:v copy -c:a copy -f flv rtmp://localhost:1935/live/testStream

    2. You can use the scheduled playlist feature available through the StreamPublisher module from the Wowza website. The module uses a static playlist, but you can create a custom shell script/code to generate a randomized playlist and reload that to the module periodically.

    3. You can extend the streampublisher package itself (source code is currently available on GitHub), and build in code to randomly select a file in a given directory and add the file as a stream to the playlist. This might be the better option for you, but would require some development work.