Wowza Community

One streaming application with multiple streams or...?

I’ve just started evaluating WSE for use in an upcoming project and was hoping that someone could answer a question for me. For this project, I’ll have ~50 custom hardware devices that stream video (MJPEG at 480p) and audio. These devices can be turned on and off dynamically (e.g., there’s no guarantee that every one of them will always be turned on and streaming). I’ve seen the document that details using ffmpeg with WSE and I believe this approach would work for me. I’m going to try running one instance of ffmpeg per device to mux the video/audio streams together and then transcode into something that WSE can ingest.

With regard to WSE, I know there’s a default “live” streaming application. I’ve read the document that describes publishing/playing a live stream but I’m a little unclear on something. In order to publish a stream to WSE, the document says that I need to create a .stream file containing a stream name and URI. In the document, the example URI is udp://0.0.0.0:10000. Since I could have up to 50 incoming streams at once, do I need to create 50 different .stream files each with a unique name/URI?

Hi @BMT. Since the streams are dynamic, and you convert from mjpeg with ffmpeg, maybe you can use the FLV format output and send the streams to Wowza over RTMP? That way, you can use a single application “live”, and just give each stream a different name in ffmpeg. The alternative is indeed to have one separate .stream file for each camera and start them via the Streaming Engine Manager, or via the REST API, when the camera comes on.

Another question is how you’ll automatically start ffmpeg when a camera starts broadcasting, but maybe you already have a solution for that.