Wowza Community

Specify Wowza nDVR start time

My livestreaming events are fairly typical. They start at an assigned time (let’s say 9am) and go for set times (such as 2 hours).

I typically start my livestream about 30-40 minutes before an event starts, and this is where the Wowza nDVR sets as my start time.

But, I wonder, is there a way I can manually set a “start time” for my nDVR, in much the same way as I manually start the recording of the incoming streams in the “Incoming Streams” tab in the Streaming Engine manager?

The reason I ask this, if a user comes on and starts watching the live stream about 10 minutes after the start time, I would prefer if they scrub back to the start, and they hit the start of the meeting/presentation that I am streaming, and not the 40 minutes of "dead time’ that preceeded it.

We are facing the same issue. Were you able to find a solution to it. We are trying the UTC-based request delegate. So far, we haven’t succeeded.

Hello Keerth,

No, we have not found a workaround, or anything of the sort. The best I have come up with, is that when I start streaming 40 mins or so, in advance of an event, about 10 mins before the event, I go into the nDVR settings, and restart the instance. I realize this cuts off the viewers that are already connected, but it restarts the DVR. I’ve not had complaint about the restarting the instance. Those who are watching online before the event starts simply restart the player.

But I don’t always do this. It’s about 50/50 that I simply let the DVR play all the “dead time” before an event. But, I always do change and specify the nDVR time to the length of the event, before I start streaming (and adding about 15-20 mins in case things go over time).

Best of luck

Hello Jason,

Thanks for the update. We have tried 1 work around with some success - we go in to the file system and delete the files containing the recordings of the dead time. The DVR then starts only from the first available file. So, much of the dead time is scrubbed.

I didn’t understand the last sentence. How does setting the nDVR time to the length of the event help?

We are running some experiments. If we succeed, I will let you know.

Regards