Wowza Community

Best Flash player for for real-time Axis video in Windows desktop browsers

I want to play realtime video from Axis cameras in a web application in modern Windows desktop browsers (e.g., IE 11+, Edge, Chrome, Firefox).

I’ve installed Streaming Engine 4.7.1 and successfully connected it to my test Axis camera. I can view the camera’s video in the Wowza Player but latency at 30+ seconds is unacceptably slow. My main requirement for the video is low latency. I don’t care much about quality or resolution but responsiveness is essential as the web app controls the camera via PTZ so we want as close to real-time feedback as possible. Also, bandwidth isn’t really a concern as typically each Axis camera in our system has at most one live stream.

Reading various docs it seems that until WebRTC is widely supported, using a Flash player with RTSP/RTMP is the only current viable option to get low latency video from Wowza. Assuming this is correct, what Flash players do folks recommend for playing RTSP/RTMP video from Streaming Engine in Windows desktop browsers? The player should also be JavaScript controllable so the camera video window can be created/destroyed problematically.

Thanks, John

To answer my own question, I’m using Flowplayer to play Flash RTMP streams and am getting sub-second latencies playing RTSP streams from Streaming Engine.

Somewhat off topic, it seems somewhat odd that the browser vendors are trying so hard to kill off Flash/RTMP video before there are mature, widely supported HTML5 alternatives for playing low-latency video. WebRTC is supposedly the replacement but it seems awfully complex and browser support is immature and uneven…