Hello all,
I am part of a project team developing an internal video broadcast solution for periodic internal communications at my workplace (~3000 employees). A contractor provided our organization with this service on a one-time basis in January this year, now there is a desire to have it available internally on a full-time basis. Our main delivery target is Windows 7 desktop and laptop PCs (although BB10 + iPhone devices are a future possibility); we have both Flash and Silverlight plugins installed everywhere.
Based on what the contractor left behind on the servers we provided, it looks like they were doing the following (and other than terribly low audio levels, it worked great):
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encoding audio / video to an MPEG2TS stream on an unknown external device (we are looking to replace that piece with a laptop / capture card / software encoder)
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distributing to the majority of our LAN via multicast with Wowza 3.6 + Push Publishing add-on (playback via Wowza’s sample Silverlight player)
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providing a fallback to Unicast delivery for the few non-multicast enabled areas of our network (playback via Flash / JWPlayer)
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both players are embedded in a web page (with full-screen support enabled) - and we would like to keep it this way if possible - i.e. no external QuickTime or Windows Media player window.
Unfortunately I wasn’t involved with “low level” implementation back in January, and it appears that either the Wowza license expired and/or the contractor removed the application configuration, so I can’t examine or document the actual configuration properly (the admin webpage doesn’t load, even though I’m pointing at a port that matches the config files).
We are looking towards Telestream Wirecast 5 as an encoding solution (it is particularly attractive for us due to its ability to capture a screen - i.e. Powerpoint slides - from another PC) - but after reading [https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-push-streams-to-cdns-and-other-services-push-publishing] I am unable to determine if that encoder can output a format that Wowza can then distribute as unicast + multicast as described above.
My questions are:
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Can Wirecast output the format necessary for what I am trying to accomplish with Wowza? Ideally, to economize on server horsepower, we only want Wowza to act as a delivery mechanism, not a transcoder (i.e. accept a single stream in the correct format, and shoot it out to the two types of targets).
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If Wirecast is capable of meeting our needs, what output format would have to be selected in Wirecast (I need to setup a functional demo prior to purchase, and note that it does not offer MP2-TS)?
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If Wirecast won’t do what I need it to - can you point to an alternative reliable software encoder that can?
Thanks for any assistance… KN.
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