PIP two live video streams

[system]

I hope this is not too off topic. I’m looking for ways to implement PIP (Picture-In-Picture) feature in a live streaming application. Let’s say I’ve two live streams, A & B. I think there’re two possible approaches:

1. Find a video mixer that mixes the two live video into PIP layout and send to the streaming server as a single video stream

2. The client application pulls two live streams from the streaming server and the client app lays the PIP (secondary) video over the main video

Approach 1 should not occupy extra bandwidth between the camera & the streaming server but may introduce significant delay in the video. Approach 2 will double the bandwidth but shouldn’t introduce additional delay to the video.

Suggestions & comments are grealy appreciated!

Thanks,

Bruce

[Richard_Lanham]

Bruce,

I think option 2 is much better, because a key feature of the PIP is switching between streams, and this would be much easier and much faster in option 2.

Richard

[Richard_Lanham]

Sounds like a good solution. Wirecast is great for that kind of thing.

Richard

[Richard_Lanham]

Not at present. I think this may be a future feature of Wowza Transcoder (composite), but I don’t have a time frame.

Richard

[Richard_Lanham]

Krishna,

I think this is a possible future feature of the Wowza Transcoder, but I do not have a time frame for that. Meanwhile there is not a very satisfactory way of replaying two live streams in sync. I have heard of a VLC add-on called Mosaic that might be useful but I have not used it.

Richard

[Kenneth_Lee]

Hi Richard,

You may be correct. I just tried using Wirecast to do PIP with two video sources, combine it as one stream and publish it to Wowza. The video latency is about 5 seconds from the client end. This is 2-3 seconds more than the my normal lantency.

Nevertheless, Wirecast is very easy to use and allows a beginner like me to easily add cool video effects to the stream.

Thanks,

Bruce

[Kenneth_Lee]

Just an udpate for those who are interested in Wirecast, I was able to get the latency down to 2-3 seconds. I set the encoding setting for resolution & frame rate to be the same as my input sources and that solved it.

I was running everything from my laptop which is equipped with 2GHz T7200 with 2 GB ram. I guess even this is not powerful enough for the job.

Thanks,

Bruce

[Morgan_Catlin]

Is it possible to PIP on the Wowza side using the Transcoder AddOn?

[krishna_mohan]

Hi Richard,

This question is asked a long time back.

I have two streams to same application from two different publishers, i want to overlay 2nd stream on 1/4th portion of 1st stream and save the resultant on server-side.

To show 2 streams to user in overlayed fashion, am using flash to play and overlay 2nd stream over 1st stream. But the problem is to save two streams on server-side as the way user watches them(overlayed).

so I want do PIP on server using transcoder addon and record the file. is it possible now?

If not possible what are my options?

Krishna

[Kristeen_Wurtele]

Is Wowza streaming server any closer to this capability?