Wowza Community

Live streaming temporary audio mute

We are using the Wowza Streaming Engine to transcode and distribute a live video stream. Everything is going well here, however the users of the system require an audio mute facility. At certain times they want to continue with the video, but mute any audio. After a few minutes etc., they want to re-enable the audio when things are back to normal. This ‘muting’ happens quite a few times during our usually long (5hrs+) live streams.

Unfortunately, it seems Wowza natively doesn’t support this, at least without restarting the application, and muting on the client by controlling their player instance would be unacceptable.

Does anyone have any idea how this could be accomplished?

I did see a suggestion of changing the transcoder template, but this would require restarting the stream and cause the clients to drop out: Programatic audio mute/unmute

Another thing I did think of was using FFMPEG to process the stream before it got to Wowza, but again it seems this can either be all or nothing, i.e. you can’t programmatically control the mute mid-stream.

Thank you.

Hello Stuart,

The best way to control audio would be at the source of the stream.

If that is not possible, you could also use the StreamPublisher module to schedule two renditions of the same stream, one would be with full level audio, while the other one would be with audio but muted.

For this to work you would need to program the times at which you would need to switch the streams.

More info on that module can be found here.

Regards,

Alex