Hi @john mcqueen, do you mean that the users send multiple bitrates to your server, and the server prepares a SMIL for that, or do you use Wowza Transcoder?
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If you use Wowza transcoder; you could use “ngrp” instead of SMIL; as ngrp dynamically creates the SMIL from a transcoder group definition.
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If you allow users to send multiple bitrates as separate streams to your server, and you want the server to prepare a SMIL, it’s a little more complicated.The challenge is that the server doesn’t know which streams belong together, how many streams there are in the ABR, and what the specifications are for each stream.
2A. You must either let the user define this on forehand, e.g. allow the user to specify the ABR in a Portal GUI prior to starting the stream,
2B. Or you must write a custom module that detects incoming streams, and assumes certain streams to belong together in an ABR, e.g. based on their streamname.
I’ve implemented both 1, 2A and 2B before. Logically, #1 is simple to implement, and 2A is relatively simple, but requires users who understand ABR and stream metadata; 2B requires more effort from you, but won’t require any intelligence from the user (other than that they must set up their encoder to produce multiple streams for the ABR)