Wowza Community

Help with vod edge application to stream in HLS

Hello all,

I am new in all the streaming world and I have some questions regarding the usage of Wowza to stream in HLS protocol.

This project I’m working on is to stream mp4 files stored on our organization NAS to users that have VLC player on there’s desktops. Most of our users don’t have bandwidth issues but some might have.

For this project I used the VOD edge application with the NAS as my media cache source.

My questions are:

  1. Do I really need to use the HLS protocol for my project? What will you use?

  2. Do I need to transcode (for example in FFMPEG) all my mp4 files to be able to stream it in HLS ? or is Wowza can do it for me?

  3. Is it possible to stream in HLS without the need to use smil files and adaptive bit rate ? (as I say before, most of my users don’t have bandwidth issues).

  4. What do I need to configure in my VOD edge application to support the HLS steaming.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

Idan.

Hello there and welcome to the Wowza support forum.

1: HLS is primarily used to stream to iOS mobile devices. If this is not part of your target audience then you wont need to enable it

2: HLS requires h.264 video and AAC audio. mp3 is also supported using 128kbs, 44100hz stereo. With these encodings, no transcoding is required

3: Adaptive bit rate streaming is not required for any streaming protocol

4: You can enable HLS streaming via the Stream Engine Manager, under "Applications/app-name/Playback Types/Apple HLS

Regards,

Salvadore