Wowza Community

Inbound Bitrate vs. Outbound Bitrate : Actual & Configured

I have two questions. First, during a stream today using the West Coast (Oregon) RTMP location, we were sending a 550 or so Kbps stream to the Wowza Oregon server through a wired high-speed Internet connection in B.C…

Strangely, the Inbound Bitrate on the Wowza dashboard was showing about 330 Kbps inbound and the player (JW Player) was breaking up onscreen regularly at 360p but working fine at 288p. Obviously, our full 500+ stream wasn’t making it inbound. Any thoughts as to why? And, how can we avoid this in the future?

Second, during another broadcast, we were sending an approx. 760 Kbps stream to the Wowza server and the dashboard showed the Actual Outbound as exceeding the Configured Outbound. We noticed this before the show and dropped the inbound bitrate down so as to not cause potential problems (after which the Actual Outbound was below the Configured Outbound). My second question is, would there have been any problems if the Actual Outbound exceeded the Configured Outbound?

Cheers,

Mike

Mike,

Here is a breakdown of the bit rate calculations in transcoder dashboard:

Inbound Bitrate: Actual – The rate of the stream traveling from the encoder to Wowza Streaming Cloud, in kilobits per second (Kbps).

Outbound Bitrate: Actual – The total actual bitrate of all outbound video streams, in kilobits per second (Kbps).

Outbound Bitrate: Configured – The total configured bitrate of all outbound video streams, in kilobits per second (Kbps).

All of this is located in the Wowza Streaming Cloud User’s Guide.

So, to clarify, the Outbound Actual will tell you how much bandwidth is being used by your viewers depending on which bitrate they are pulling. You should see this number grow larger than your total configured bitrate. The configured bitrate is the sum of the bitrate for all configured renditions. (i.e: 1080 @ 4400Kbps + 720 @ 2460Kbps + 480 @ 1600Kbps = 8460Kbps configured).

Regarding the network issue with 500Kbps inbound. Network continuity could be an issue in your area, or perhaps there may be an issue en route to the entrypoint. One tool you could look into using is Ping Plotter to monitor network health from your location to the entrypoint and see if there are any hops providing an issue for you. I would always suggest sending a higher, better quality for the transcoder to transrate for your viewers. At a cost of 9.5 cents per GB, your upload would go from 236MB per hour to 484MB per hour at a 1024Kbps bitrate. If the connection drops lower, you are still within a “healthy” bitrate range for that 360 source stream. I would definitely suggest a test to see the results.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Mac