Wowza Community

Alternative to monitoring content folder for dynamic streams

I would like to restream RMTP streams, but not include them in the content folder.

Is it possible to provide the target live stream address as a url paramter when requesting wowza to restream?

This tutorial shows an equivelent way to do it (provided you place a dynamically generated sdp or stream file in the content

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-monitor-content-folder-for-sdp-and-stream-files-to-start-publishing-streams-serverlistenerstartupstreamsmonitor

But if I could, I would prefer to provide the source stream as an argument to my wowza application via the restream URL.

Thanks!

Hello there, sorry for the delayed reply.

I am not sure exactly what you are trying to do. can you please provide clarification and perhaps an example of what you are trying to achieve? A description of the desired setup would be helpful as well.

Best,

Salvadore

Hey Salvadore,

No problem!

I’ll try to make it as clear as possible (please excuse the obtusely point form nature of it)

Ok so:

  1. We have linux boxes with IP cameras attached to them. Lets call them NVRs

  2. The NVR lives at a remote site where the only access to it is via a cellular link

2.5) Wowza lives on a server in AWS which a user has a broadband connection to. The user does not have access to the NVR directly. Wowza does not maintain a constant connection the NVR.

  1. We want to access video (Lets call that video Remote Archived Video) saved on the linux box (saved video from the IP cameras) through wowza. Wowza lives on a media server in the cloud (AWS).

  2. We also want to save any Remote Archived Video that was viewed through wowza, to our cloud based wowza server becuase re-accessing the same content over cellular is waste of money. ie if one user viewed IPcam1@2.35pm for 5 min, then if someone else looks at that video, they should look at the cached version, not the remote-over-cellular version

  3. Our initial solution was to use media cache. It works great in that it autocaches any thing streamed to the wowza server, and the trick play feature works great with the remote files accessed on the NVR.

  4. The problem with media cache is that the cache is a bit of mystery. I’d like to generate thumbnails for clips of video saved to wowza. but with media cache, I can’t read or really do anything with the binaries.

  5. The NVR can provide us with the Remote Archived Video as an RTSP or RTMP stream… This would allow us to use the Live Recording feature which turns streamed RTSP into flv files for later viewing.

  6. The problem I ran into with treating the remote files as RTSP streams (in content directory) is that I have to know about them ahead of time. But the nature of the Remote Archived Video is that it is constantly updating and recycling old data.

My thought was that if I could dynamically generate the remote RTSP url for Wowza to latch onto (instead of having to put streams in the content folder), I could access any Remote Archived Video I want and enjoy the awesomeness of Live Recording.

One thing that just popped into my head is that I could have a series of rtsp streams per camera in the content folder that represent time starting from now to -1month(or whatever my max archive depth is). I am not sure if I can do the translation on the NVR side to the appropriate file, but it seems like it could happen.

Hi,

One method that you can use is to have a software encoder such as ffmpeg reside on the NVR linux boxes and use this to re-stream the rtmp/rtsp stream (using a shell script to obtain the dynamic VOD name server-side) to your Wowza server. This would help you maintain control of the live stream published to Wowza, and allow you to get thumbnails of the stream.

Michelle