Wowza Community

LIVE vs RTPLIVE

Okay, this may seem like a very basic/silly question, but it’s been bugging me for some time now. What, exactly, is the difference between streaming using LIVE vs streaming using RTPLIVE.

Over a year ago I set up a test using RTPLIVE – basically, just to webcast a small music festival. It worked and I’ve continued using RTPLIVE from that point forward. But, I was reading through some of the documentation one day and saw that it recommended that I stream through LIVE for the type of streaming I was doing. There isn’t any documentation (that I’ve seen, at least) that can tell me what the technical differences are between LIVE and RTPLIVE. Why, for example, would I use one over the other when they both seem to work the same (at least, for what I’m doing, which is just about 4 hours a week from a dozen different locations – all live camera feeds of speakers/presenters).

Take a look starting at page 30 of the User’s Guide. This should help to answer your question. It should cover this topic.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/user-guides

Charlie

The practical reason to use StreamType live instead of rtp-live is if you are doing HTTP streaming (Cupertino, Smooth or Sanjose). In that case, if you use rtp-live and a Flash client is first to stream the MediaCaster system starts the stream, then later when that client disconnects the MediaCaster system will stop the stream. Use StreamType live so that Flash client will not be able to start the stream, you have to use StreamManager to start and lock the stream.

Richard

Charlie

I’m not sure I follow… the User Guide I’m looking at (at page 29) starts the Advanced Configuration Topic (page 30 starts the discussion on Live Stream Repeaters).

Page 22 comes the closest to answering my question, as it talks about “Stream Types” and states the following:

live - Publish and play live video content (best for one-to-many streaming of live events).

rtp-live - Re-streaming of an RTSP/RTP, native RTP or MPEG-TS stream.

While this is a great start, my question is more about additional information about these two stream types. It would appear, from the User Guide, that I should have been using “live” all along, since I am webcasting “live events” for a “one-to-many” situation. I’ve been using “rtp-live” all this time, and it’s actually been working out very well for me (using Amazon EC2 instances). So I was just curious what the “under-the-hood” differences were between “live” and “rtp-live”. In other words, is there any technical reason why I should start using “live”?

This question isn’t directly related to a problem I’m having – everything is actually going very well for us, but I am interesting in learning more about these two stream types to make sure I’m not going down a bad path in the future.

Richard

Thanks! That’s exactly the type of information I was looking for. An example like that is something I can wrap my brain around.