Wowza Community

Setup a VOD with adaptive bit rate

Hello All,

I am new to Wowza and I am trying to set up a VOD. I would like to copy my video file and have multiple files generated through wowza with Adaptive bit rate functionality.

First thing I would like to know if it is possible? If so how ?

Regards

Farzana.

Hello there and welcome to the Wowza support forum.

Video on Demand ABR is supported in Wowza. You will need multiple renditions(copies of the video at alternate bit-rates) that are key frame aligned.

This guide will walk you through setting up ABR for VOD:

How to do adaptive bitrate streaming

To achieve key frame alignment you can use ffmpeg. However, encoding keyframe aligned renditions with ffmpeg has been known to be problematic and unreliable.

However, I did come across a forum contribution that showed a successful approach for generating key frame aligned multi-bitrate rendition for VOD with ffmpeg by doing multiple passes. This was done on Linux and I have not tested. It may not work on other platforms.

ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v veryfast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 1 -b:v 286k -s 384x216 bigbuck-350k.mp4
ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v fast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 2 -b:v 286k -s 384x216 bigbuck-350k.mp4
ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v fast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 2 -b:v 836k -s 640x360 bigbuck-900k.mp4

You may also find this guide helpful:

How to encode video on demand content

Another option would be to use the static video as the source for a live stream and use the Wowza Transcoder to generate the key frame aligned renditions for you.

How to do basic server-side publishing with Stream class streams

Once you have the live stream, to do live ABR streaming you would send a source stream to the Wowza Transcoder and transrate the single stream into an ABR set.

This article provides more details about using Wowza Transcoder for live streams:

How to set up and run Wowza Transcoder AddOn for live streaming

I hope this answers your question.

Regards,

Salvadore

Hi Salvadore,

Thanks you so much for the response. We are really stuck up with this bit rate conversion and not able to go ahead. We will definitely go through the links and hope to resolve the issue.

Thanks once again.

Regards

Farzana.