Wowza Community

Live stream using flash on iOS & non iOS

Forgive my noob question because Im a bit confused, if is it possible to do live stream using flash on ipads and iphones and etc… as syncronized as a normal web live stream? or is it only static flash videos that the transcoders can play into iOS devices.

Thanks

I’m not sure exactly what you are asking. You cannot run Flash on iOS device. You can publish h.264/Speex from Flash to Wowza Transcoder to transcode to h.264/AAC, a live stream that can be played back on iOS devices. Take a look at this article:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-convert-flash-player-11-output-from-h-264-speex-audio-to-h-264-aac-audio-using-wowza-transcoder

as synchronized as a normal web live stream

Do you mean low latency? Cupertino streaming to iOS devices is higher latency than RTMP streaming to Flash client on the desktop. You can mitigate that with short key frame frequency and low cupertinoChunkDurationTarget setting. Take a look at this guide:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-apple-hls-packetization-cupertinostreaming

Richard

I think this thread is a lot more complicated than it needs to be!

Basically, yes, if you send an H.264 live stream to Wowza, you can watch that same stream in RTMP (Flash) on desktops, Cupertino on iOS, RTSP for Android, etc. Note the various methods/URLs under the Playback heading on this page:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-set-up-live-streaming-using-an-rtmp-based-encoder

Same with any video-on-demand content – the same file in Wowza can be viewed on all of those different formats/devices:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-set-up-video-on-demand-streaming

None of this requires the Wowza Transcoder Add-On, and if your video bitrate isn’t too high (we target around 600 kbps), you should be fine for most users/connections. Everybody sees the exact same H.264 video – Wowza simply formats the container to be compatible with these different formats and devices.

If you want to target users on slower cell/wifi networks, you may want another stream around 200 kbps or perhaps even lower, depending on your content. The cheapest solution would be to use the free Flash Media Live Encoder and send multiple bitrate streams to Wowza and let the clients auto-select based on available bandwidth – see the sections titled “Adaptive Bitrate Streaming” at the above links. If you can fit that into your workflow, perhaps in place of this videowhisper thing, that would be ideal. The next cheapest solution would be to only offer the higher bitrate stream live, and then encode an extra lower bitrate version for on-demand viewing – if live viewing isn’t too important, as compared to on-demand viewing, this is a good method too.

If it’s critical to get multiple bitrate streams live, then you might need the Wowza Transcoder Add-On to let Wowza generate those lower bitrate streams live. But I tend to avoid that, since it would also require greater system resources (as your server also becomes an encoder).

Hi

If you have Flash clients connecting to a stream now you will still be able to connect using Flash when using the transcoder to lower the bitrate (you don’t have to choose the lower bitrate stream).

Wowza can stream to all the client types at the same time.

Here is a rough diagram :

Source --> Wowza --> Flash (playing source stream)

Source --> Wowza --> iOS (playing transcoded stream)

What encoder are you using?

Can you tell me the codec information on the stream being published to Wowza?

Jason

Sorry if I confused you, I understand that we cant play flash on iOS, if we use the cupertino stream address for iOS, would the flash livestream be transcoded and be available on iOS devices?

Because we have this component that uses flash and rtmp address for live streaming using wowza.

Now we want that the livestream to be also accessed by iOS devices.

I dont know what is the right approach for this, any recommendation is appreciated.

Thanks

Where using the videowhisper component for joomla

here’s how it works: http://www.videowhisper.com/?p=Requirements

Thanks

aside from iOS devices we would also want to be able to stream on non iOS like android, etc…

Thank you all for the feedbacks.

Best regards,