Wowza Community

Live streaming to Android issues

I am suggesting that you try VLC for live encodign since it uses the same x264 encoder that I used for my VOD sample.

Charlie

Well, the bad news is I could not get VLC to work at all. I went step by step through the guide to set it up and going but I constantly got a “not found” error when trying to pull the stream.

The good news is that, from a Mac using Quicktime broadcaster, I was able to get video to go to the Android, iPhone, Blackberry and VLC. The quality wasn’t good and the performance wasn’t as good, but I think we can now narrow it down to the h.264 codec Wirecast uses.

I guess it’s time to research a different encoder. FME? Any suggestions?

Thanks for the reply, Richard. I have tried both RTP and RTSP, starting with the Streammanager and without, and nothing seems to work. Wowza gets the stream, I can see that. I just can’t get it to play back on anything.

I have been in contact with Telestream about Wirecast. They assure me that the h.264 encoder in Wirecast is the same as in the Quicktime Broadcaster. Their thought is that there is something missing in the metatdata that Android needs.

Their new version of Wirecast will use the MainConcept codec, which FME uses. I can’t get Android to see that stream either.

I’ve exhausted each guide, on multiple systems with different Internet connections and have not managed to get this to work for Android. The only thing I have managed to get to work has been Quicktime Broadcaster and Kulabyte XStream.

To be honest, VLC and ffmpeg are not practical tools for an enterprise deployment, in my opinion. I need something more robust and manageable.

Telestream wrote me to say that they would ensure this works in version 4 of Wirecast, but no word yet on when that will be available.

I can verify that gets video on the Droid, but now the audio is horrible. There are dropouts every half second. If I switch it back to Baseline, the audio is fixed but I’m back to no video on the Droid.