problem switching streams

[Thomas_Frigyesi]

We are currently testing wowza for a project where we need to stream a few live camera feeds out on one stream (with the ability to switch the input source)

I have set up a test with 2 cameras (different axis models) using stream class

the problem is…when I open the RTSP stream in VLC only the source during which VLC has been started works

so it starts while cam 1 is playing and works…it switches to cam 2 - I see a gray picture

sometimes with very little parts of the picture (top left corner mostly) flickering in it

than it switches back to cam 1 which works again and so on

if i restart VLC while on cam2 it also works (but cam1 does not after switching)

the same is true when i switch to the extremist test video

with that test i noticed that audio does play as expected

my guess is that VLC initializes some settings and after switching they do not match the video…so it might very well be a VLC problem

can anyone help?

[Roger_Littin]

There will be different codec configurations for each camera which vlc is not handling the change very well. Have you tried it using a flash player?

[Richard_Lanham]

Different players are more or less sensitive to encoding changes when switching occurs. Identical cameras should help in all cases.

Richard

[Wolfgang_Preiss]

Some experiance I had:

I am using several cameras, and do my upstream with Flash Media Encoder - which needs to interrupt the stream if you want to change the video source. I now use manycam (basically a fake cam tool) which allows a larger number of cameras as source, and provides one internal “cam” which can be used as source in your encoder (FME or anything else)

When changing cameras, the encoder (or the stream) does not notice any difference and just keeps working.

I also use manycam to switch from live camera to playing a video file, if necessary. You have a lot of other useless gadgets in manycam, but after it is free and does not place a watermark in the stream it is the best choice. Manycam is available for windows and mac at www.manycam.com

[Thomas_Frigyesi]

i tried the live viewer example and it plays without problem

can I expect that to work with vlc when the cameras are identical and therefore the stream properties match?