Wowza Community

Live streaming + on demand, possible?

Hello everyone.

We are evaluating the Wowza server as a possible solution to a recent issue we are having.

We are trying to solve an scenario where there is only one available camera stream from an Onvif compliant camera.

We would like to multiply that stream for any number of users but we have the following restrictions:

  • part of the network (the one the camera is in) does not support multicast, so configuring the camera to do multicast is not an option.

  • we need to be on demand, in such a way that the stream is not consumed if there are no clients interested.

So we are currently looking for “something” able to do multicasting or multi-unicast on a demand basis.

At the beginning, the Wowza server look promising but we are starting to doubt if it can be done with it.

  • First of all we were unable to configure the Live(source) from the Onvif camera, and apparently in the tutorials, it seems it is the camera who should be configured to send the video instead of wowza requesting it when necessary. Is it true? Can we configure a Live Source from a RTSP server and let the Wowza request the video from the source? (unlickily it is not a well known camera so it is not in the encoder list)

  • Can we do it in such a way that the wowza acts as a rtsp proxy so clients connects to the proxy and are agnostic of camera configuration?

  • Can we do it in such a way that “on demand” requests or releases the source stream. Which means camera stream is not consumed if no clients are connected to the proxy requesting the camera?

All other solutions we have found seems to have similar caveeats. We don’t want the server to be consuming the source all the time. (lets say in the limited network we could have 200 cameras but there is only bandwitch to watch 8 simultaneously and it might happen that all users want to watch the same camera, which actually does only support 1 unicast stream)

It would be greatly appreciated a few tips in how to accomplished it or if it is even possible.

Thanks.

Hi,

Wowza can pull in an RTSP stream from the camera by setting up a stream file with the RTSP URL. Some cameras may need extra config within the Wowza stream file settings, you can some examples here. When the stream file is active then Wowza will be pulling in the stream from the camera.

Paul