Live Streaming using MAIN instead of BASELINE for HLS

[C_Leite]

Hi, I want to use MAIN profile instead of using BASELINE, in this case we do not need to streaming to iPhone, but we really need to play it using HLS in quicktime.

We noticed that when we use MAIN profile in Wirecast, it Encode and send to the server but for some reason Wowza add baseline as the profile so it doesn’t work, so we think that if Wowza just pass it trough as it is without add Baseline as profile it will work.

Do we have any option to use MAIN as our h264 profile and play it with Quicktime?

We are trying to streaming a 720p video and it work good when we use MAIN profile, but we can’t play it in Quicktime.

Our actual system is:

• Wowza 2.2.4

• We are using Wirecast 4 for MAC with a HDV Plugin from a HDV Sony Tape Deck

• Our Wowza is installed in a Centos 64bit

Best regards,

[Richard_Lanham]

Wowza does not change profile. You might have to use Baseline profile.

Richard

[Richard_Lanham]

I’m not sure why this would be. Baseline is easier to decode than Main and is required in for older iOS devices.

Richard

[Ian_Beyer]

For 720p, it’s likely not going to look good in baseline profile - Quicktime X should have no trouble playing Main profile (See Apple’s tech brief on H.264 in Quicktime: http://images.apple.com/quicktime/pdf/H264_Technology_Brief.pdf). If you do baseline, make sure you’re at level 3.1 or higher. Below that will struggle with 720p.

Fixing this shouldn’t require a $15K tricaster , which uses FMLE as its encoding engine. Wirecast 4 uses MainConcept’s SDK, similar to many of the high-end commercial hardware encoders.

-Ian

[C_Leite]

We are trying to streaming a 720p video from one church to another locations using Wirecast, but it just work right when we use MAIN so when we use baseline the video Start jump, we already contact Wirecast and they we looking to fix this apparently problem, but at mean time we was thinking about using MAIN, so really we do not have any other option? We don’t want to invest $15000 to have Tricaster to solve this problem, we are almost there we just need to fix it.

Thanks again!

[C_Leite]

It’s not so much that playing back Main profile in Quicktime X is a problem - when we play back the encoded file recorded to disk it plays fine but when watching the same encoded file by live streaming through wowza the file ends up looking corrupted. Baseline does not have the corrupted file look when streamed through wowza but is not as smooth as a main profile encoded file - which is why we’d like to get Main profile working.

I know wowza is setting some parameters on the file header for HLS because once streamed my 1280x720 file is being marked as 853x480 by wowza (according to inspector). I’m just wondering if they are also marking it as Baseline even though it’s encoded Main and causing quicktime to see it as a corrupted file?