Send an SRT Stream to Wowza Streaming Engine With Wirecast

 

Challenged to deliver high-quality streams over suboptimal networks? Looking to achieve low-latency content acquisition despite an iffy connection to the ingest point?

Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) has got you covered. The reliable, open-source protocol ensures high-quality streaming over noisy public networks. But you’ll want to use a media server like Wowza Streaming Engine to repackage the stream for large-scale delivery.

In this video tutorial, Justin shows how to use Wirecast to send an SRT stream to Wowza Streaming Engine. From there, he demonstrates the steps required to transmux that stream into Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for live video delivery to any device.

 

Full Video Transcript:

Justin Miller:

Using Secure Reliable Transport to stream to Wowza Streaming Engine is a great option when dealing with noisy networks. We’ll demonstrate how to do this using Wowza Streaming Engine installed remotely with a dedicated IP address. A demo version of Wirecast will be our encoder streaming via SRT, and we’ll use the Stream Tester for JW Player 8 for playback of the transmuxed stream as HLS. In Wowza Streaming Engine, we’ll first need to go under Applications and Add Application. Make the type Live and name it something that will be used in a URL. Since we planned the playback with Apple HLS, we can uncheck all other playback types and Save.

Now under Stream Files, we’ll Add Stream File. I’ll name this something different than the application. And then under the stream URI, enter SRT://0.0.0.0: and make the port 6970 or later. For UDP transport, using all zeros is okay. Once it’s added, we’ll go back to Stream Files and connect it under Actions. Here, we’ll set the MediaCaster Type to SRT and OK the connection. Now under Incoming Streams, we can see we’re waiting for a stream. Let’s go into Wirecast and start streaming via SRT. If you hadn’t added a shot yet, I’d recommend using your webcam. Hey, everybody. Okay. Now that it’s added, we can set up the stream by selecting SRT as the destination, then change the address to reference the IP address of your Wowza Streaming Engine instance.

The port will be the one used in the stream file. Once those changes are saved, you’ll still need to make your preview live. And then we can start streaming, and you should see a connection indicated. Back in Wowza Streaming Engine, we can refresh our incoming stream and see the status is active. If we look at the stream, we can verify network throughput. To see the transmux stream using HLS, go to Test Playback. Here, we can grab the HLS URL. It’s probably using the internal IP address, so you may need to change this before copying that URL. Now in the JW Player Stream Tester, we can enter the URL and Test Stream. That’s it for using Secure Reliable Transport to stream to Wowza Streaming Engine. Thanks for watching, and happy streaming.