Hi Leonard,
OK thanks for the clarification. So you are basically looking at creating your own files in different bitrates to then provide that as an ABR playlist? There are third-party services that can do this for you. Please see our article on using encoding.com as an example of creating ABR sets of your video assets.
It should also be possible to automate this using tools such as ffmpeg. I don’t have any working examples to hand (perhaps others will chime in - I found this example on a quick Google, but I can’t vouch for it).
Alternatively, you could use Wowza Streaming Engine to create the ABR files for you by “publishing” your MP4 source as a stream to Wowza using our Stream Publisher with the Transcoder and “record all streams” or Live Stream Record enabled (or just use something like ffmpeg to publish the file to Wowza as a “live” stream).
If you make a call to the medialist HTTP Provider while the stream is being published and transcoded then you can also automatically create the smil file that could then be used to play back the recorded assets as an ABR stream, e.g. for a stream called myStream in an app called live
curl --digest -u username:password "http://[WOWZA-IP]:8086/medialist?streamname=ngrp:myStream_all&application=live&format=smil" > myStream.smil
So it is possible to automate a lot of this yourself if you’re handy with scripts, or alternatively just engage an encoding service.
The key thing is to ensure that each file is keyframe-aligned, otherwise the switching between renditions may fail.
Regards,
Paul