Wowza Community

Problems with VLC and Wowza

Hi, I’m trying to learn how to use Wowza, been doing fine with VOD, but I’m having problems running live streams. To diagnose the problem, I’ve started Wowza through the command line.

I’m using VLC to simulate a live stream, but it’s not reaching the server, I don’t see any connections attempts on the server’s command line.

I copied the default live application in a new live-2 app and disabled security for incoming streams for testing purposes. The VLC command that I’m using is this:

vlc -vvv “C:\sample.mp4” :sout=#rtp{sdp=rtsp://192.168.0.7:1935/} :sout-keep

VLC opens the file, and says its streaming, but nothing reaches the server. Any help would be highly appreciated!

Thanks

Patricio

PS: I also tried other commands, like this

vlc -vvv “C:\sample.mp4” :sout=#rtp{sdp=rtsp://192.168.0.7:1935/live-2/} :sout-keep

And from documentation examples here https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-use-vlc-as-a-live-stream-encoder-with-wowza-media-server-mpeg-ts (but I won’t even stream, the docs are outdated, 2010, and for Wowza 2.x)

vlc -vvv input_stream --sout ‘#rtp{dst=192.168.0.7,port=1935,file:///C:/sample.mp4}’

Hello Patricio, and welcome to the Wowza forum.

If you start Wowza in stand alone mode[install-dir]/bin/startup.bat you will see the output in the console. Do you see any indication of the problem when viewing this output?

If you see 4:

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.bind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.bind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.bind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.bind

Followed by 4:

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.unbind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.unbind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.unbind

INFO server comment - RTPUDPTransport.unbind

In the logs, this would indicate that UDP ports are not open.

This troubleshooting guide may help to sort this out:

How to troubleshoot RTSP/RTP playback

Please let us know if you need any other assistance in the future.

Salvadore

This article is still relevant and includes instructions for using VLC player to publish a stream.

How to use VLC as a live stream encoder with Wowza Media Server (MPEG-TS)

The MPEG-TS-based-encoder article should help you create a .stream file to pull the stream in. Hope this helps clear things up.

Salvadore

Hi Patricio,

A few things, make sure you have the latest version of VLC installed.

Adaptive bitrate streaming is not supported over RTSP.

For ABR to work correctly, all renditions of the stream must be keyframe aligned. You can use this guide to make sure this is the case:

How to debug encoder multi-bitrate key frame alignment

You can use FFMPEG to encode the renditions for proper keyframe alignment. However, using ffmpeg has been known to be problematic and unreliable.

I did come across a forum contribution that showed a successful approach for generating keyframe aligned multi-bitrate rendition for VOD with ffmpeg by doing multiple passes. This was done on Linux and I have not tested. It may not work on other platforms.

ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v veryfast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 1 -b:v 286k -s 384x216 bigbuck-350k.mp4
ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v fast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 2 -b:v 286k -s 384x216 bigbuck-350k.mp4
ffmpeg -y -i bigbuckbunny_1500.mp4 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k -c:v libx264 -preset:v fast -threads 0 -r 24 -g 48 -keyint_min 48 -sc_threshold 0 -x264opts no-mbtree:bframes=1 -pass 2 -b:v 836k -s 640x360 bigbuck-900k.mp4

You may also find this guide helpful:

How to encode video on demand content

Salvadore

Hello Salvadore, thanks for the welcome and the quick reply!

Ports are open, everything from the server side looks ok as far as I can tell

INFO vhost comment defaultVHost Bind attempt ([any]:1935:16)

INFO vhost comment defaultVHost Bind successful ([any]:1935)

INFO vhost comment defaultVHost Bind attempt ([any]:8086:4)

INFO vhost comment defaultVHost Bind successful ([any]:8086)

INFO server comment - Server.startShutdownHook: Start server shutdown hook

INFO server comment - StatsManager:startManager() Enabled=true

INFO server comment - Wowza Streaming Engine is started!

After that last “Engine is started” I get nothing, no matter what different commands I try to use in VLC (even through the GUI).

Patricio

Thanks Salvadore, I’ll look into it! As I couldn’t make VLC work, I started using FFMPEG, so far everything is working ok with it, without any changes to the server config, so at least I know that there is something wrong with VLC and not Wowza.

Now I’m fighting a little bit with adaptive bitrate, its working but I don’t know how well, I have to see how can I get detailed information on the client to see how it changes streams, etc.

Thanks again for all the help!

Patricio