Recording of TV content

[chiekurs]

Hey!

I've been asked to make a system which records a TV channel content, provides live stream and then split that content into TV shows to be shown on homepage.
Well, I haven't done much with wowza, last time I was playing with it I didn't got too far. Therefore I am kind of lost on what kind of hardware I need and what's possible and whats not.
Even tho I do understand that I need some input device like TV cards, stream from which I can parse with wowza. But still - can wowza split recorded video into several parts according to timing of shows or can I put input contents to file and serve same content to live stream simultaneously?
I'm quite sure some of you here have done it many times. And I would appreciate if someone could give me more information on this issue.
A detailed "how to" would be perfect, but that is probably too much to ask.

[rrlanham]

You can use an application with StreamType "live-record" to record and stream at the same time. Then you can play parts of a large file like this:

//play the first 10 minutes
netstream.play("longvideo.flv",0,600);

// start play 30 minutes from start, then play for 30 minutes:
netstream.play("longvideo.flv",1800,1800);

Wowza won't split the streams into separate files. You would need something else to do that.

Or you can use the LiveStreamRecord package with StreamType "live" to record segments.
http://www.wowzamedia.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2733

This comes with a client player that you can push a button to stop and start the recording, but this is a server-side example really which includes source code that you can run in other ways.

I'm not familiar with with capture cards. I have used Fastvdo SmartCapturePro encoder to stream from a TV settop box, but I think that's a hobby level solution.

Richard

[chiekurs]

Thank you very much Richard!

This clears some issues, though wouldn't that make some problems? Like I could imagine that I might records full days broadcast as one file and then serve different portions of it on request by start time of shows. But wouldn't that cause problems if same file is read by many clients at different positions at same time?
One more problem I can imagine is video quality - I assume that with wowza I can record only what I get as input and guess if I want to reduce quality I should use something like ffmpeg or anything like that and it's not something to target wowza about.
One more question is on hardware requirements - how many simultaneous connections one average server can hold? I can imagine that potentially I could have even couple thousand connections at same time.