Hi, I am working on a live-streaming prototype.
I want to be able to have a client live-stream from his browser using his webcam, preferably without installing any plugins, but flash player is still fine. Then this video should be distributed to other browser clients that will watch the stream using the HTML5 video player. I also need to keep the recording of the live-stream for later viewing. The idea is that the clients don’t need to install anything, just go to the browser and record/watch the videos live. As I mentioned before we can still tolerate installing the flash player for the recording client (not for the viewers).
We are trying to build this prototype without spending money, it’s just a test of the infrastructure and its capacities. So we are working with the free trials offered here at Wowza and also the free trials from AWS.
There are no requirements regarding video quality, we can do with low resolution video, and also we don’t need many video formats, just mp4 for example. We want to be able to play the video in Chrome and Firefox mainly, we don’t care that much about other platforms. Also for this prototype we won’t be testing many parallel streams, just maybe 2 live streams, and 3 clients viewing them.
So, here is what I have come with:
I will create an Amazon EC2 instance and use it as the basis for a CloudFront distribution. The instance will run Wowza Streaming Engine. Then Wowza Streaming Engine will accept incoming streams from the browser clients, and I have found I might be able to do this using the flash player: http://www.wowza.com/resources/4.0.6/examples/WebcamRecording/FlashRTMPPlayer11/player.html
Then Cloudfront will distribute the mp4 encoded streams with HLS protocol to HTML5 video players on the viewers browsers.
So, my question is: is this a viable plan? I am having a hard time determining if this is a viable strategy and if all the pieces of the puzzle really fit together.
For example I am not sure if the free trial for Wowza Streaming Engine supports all this behavior I intend it to support(I think I read somewhere that the free trial doesn’t support HTTP Origins, what does this mean?).
Thanks in advance!
PD: if there are other alternatives to solve my problem I would be grateful if you could share the ideas!
