Need a way to signal Wowza that a live RTSP stream has reached its end

[Jesse_Rosenberg]

We are streaming H.264 video to Wowza via RTSP using our own custom RTSP/RTP server. Some of our streams come from live cameras, others come from recorded sources (i.e. a database). However, all streams are treated as live streams from Wowza’s point of view.

The problem is that we were wondering what is the best way to signal Wowza that an “end of stream” condition has occurred. For example, our recorded source has reached its end, or we have lost connectivity to a live camera.

I have researched the RTSP spec but could not find a standard way of doing this. There are a handful of proposals out there, such as using the “END_OF_STREAM” command or using “ANNOUNCE”, but nothing that seems to have made it into an RFC.

Do you support any RTSP methods for signalling end of stream? Or would we need to notify Wowza out-of-band using a custom Wowza module (and then shut the stream down manually)?

Thanks,

Jesse

[Charlie_Good]

Are you push the streams to Wowza using RTSP/RTP ANNOUNCE? If so you can send TEARDOWN command and drop the connection. If we are pulling the stream from you then stop respondiing to the ping GET_PARAM messages and close the RTSP TCP connection. That is the best we have at this time.

Charlie

[Charlie_Good]

As long as there are viewers to the stream or the stream is started in the stream manager then Wowza will continue to try to pull the stream.

Charlie

[Charlie_Good]

I am not sure what you would use to trigger the event. Like you said before, there is not real way to send a message back to Wowza to say the stream has ended.

Charlie

[Jesse_Rosenberg]

I believe that Wowza is pulling - that is, Wowza uses RTSP to connect and then we stream back RTP over TCP (we have the force interleaved option turned on).

If we close the connection, then Wowza keeps trying to reconnect. Is there a way (i.e. config option) to tell it not to or to disable the reconnector altogether?

[Jesse_Rosenberg]

The problem as I see it then is that the viewers (in our case FlowPlayer) will need some way to know to stop asking. Would it be possible for us to create a custom module to detect this situation and notify the viewers?