FMLE and multiple bitrates

[christr]

I'm pretty sure i've seen the answer to this somewhere, but after a half hour of looking around I must be using the wrong keywords. Sorry if it's a dupe question.


Anyway, How does one select which bitrate is being played back out of Flash Media Live Encoder ? If I send up 2 different video bitrates live, what paramater in the playback URL is needed to select the various rates?

Usually I set something like MyStream as the streamname, but I remember seeing somewhere there was an additional parameter you could set in the players to pick bitrate 2 or 3 (whereas the default is bitrate 1)

Basically I just want to send up 2 or 3 rates from the same encoder and use little buttons on the page (or have 1 rate for mobile, 2 for desktop) to change the rate, or use the bw detection stuff to auto-set which rate the user can see.

thanks,
--Chris

[rrlanham]

You can add a suffix to the stream names you are publising to indicate bitrate, and use bandwidth checking to choose which stream.

Richard

[christr]

Thanks Richard.

Looks like if I set my stream name in FMLE to MyStream%i I can then use MyStream1, MyStream2, etc in the player. Cool.

--Chris

[rrlanham]

And there is another path, using dynamic streaming with Wowza Server 2. This involves using the new NetStream.Play2 method, and understanding Dynamic Streaming. (I have not done this yet, in fact you know about as much as I do about it now)

Richard

[christr]

Yeah, that's something I hope to play with at some point. Right now I just wanted to get one encoder for desktop & mobile going to 2 separate pages since some of my other encoders keep getting tied up doing other stuff. Tho I wish FMLE would let me pick mulitple audio rates also.

My issue now is finding a way to goto Win Mobile phones... plays fine in Coreplayer, but not WMP. Of course, I could send off a feed to my Win2k3 server and playback from there, but I'm trying to cut down on that bad habit.

--Chris

[Deckard]

Let's say :
- FMLE encoding with 2 different bitrates, 1 for computer (1), 1 for mobile (2),
- Stream name is livestream%i,
- Computer URL point to livestream1,
- Mobile URL point to livestream2.

Does it work like this ?

Thank you.

[rrlanham]

Yes, it will work.

Richard

[christr]

Let's say :
- FMLE encoding with 2 different bitrates, 1 for computer (1), 1 for mobile (2),
- Stream name is livestream%i,
- Computer URL point to livestream1,
- Mobile URL point to livestream2.

Does it work like this ?

Thank you.

Yeah, it'll work exactly like that. The only *catch* with this is you can't have a different audio bitrate. The video bitrate is the only thing that changes. So the audio is the same for all of the streams. That can be a downside to some... since I tend to like to use high quality audio on the high bitrate streams, I end up using a separate encoder for the low bitrate stuff so I can send lower audio quality to them. (a cellphone speaker is garbage compared to desktop speakers, so why bother sending the phone's 128kbps stereo audio?? )


--chris