Check out a live stream at the University of Illinois Chicago of a Perregrine Falcon nest outside the office of LAN Administrator Scott Quinn. When this entry was written the chicks were a little over a week old and just gaining their bearings! ABC.
UIC Peregrine Falcon's Nest Live streaming can be very useful and compelling for some situations. With Wowza Media Server 2 and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder, you can easily create Flash Video live streams; and then you can catalog and publish your streams easily, to any Web site with Ensemble Video.
First, configure Live Streaming on Wowza Media Server 2
Wowza Media Server 2, like Adobe’s Flash Media Server, implements something called “Applications,” which each enable specific streaming video functions and interactions. This includes streaming video-on-demand, video recording, and live streaming. Each application has a folder in the Wowza Media Application folder as well as a configuration folder in the Wowza Media Server Conf folder where application=specific settings are stored in an XML file.
In the Wowza Media Server installation directory, there is also an Examples folder, and in it there is a LiveVideoStreaming folder. Open that folder and if you’ve installed Wowza on a Windows server, simply double-click the install.bat file.
This will open a CMD line window that will install the Live streaming application, and once it’s installed you can press any key to close that Window. If you have Wowza Media Server installed on a Macintosh or Linux server, the process is similar (consult Wowza Media Server User documentation at http://wowzamedia.com/resources.html).
The example installer automatically creates a live streaming application (by creating a “Live” application folder, and a “Live” folder in the Conf directory which includes the specifications for the application in an Application.xml file). You can send a live stream to this new Live application from Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.
Use Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) to create the live stream
In an earlier blog entry, we introduced use Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3.1 and explained how it can be used to record videos or stream from a live video source in real time. Here are details on how to configure FMLE to stream to a Wowza Media Server live streaming application, like the one created by the example installer described above.
First start Live Encoder, and make sure your video source is working properly. You can use a built-in Web cam or hook up to an external video device through a USB or Firewire connector. If your video source is working properly, you should see the video image at the top of the screen if you have a Video Preview checked, as shown above.
On the left-hand panel, set the encoding preference you want for your video. In this example I set the image dimensions to 640x320 and the total bit rate to about 800 Kbps. To keep things simple, stick with VP6 as compression format (it’s just a bit more complicated if you want to stream MP4/F4V instead, and VP6 comes pretty close in quality anyway).
On the right-hand panel, select Output from the dropdown menu. Enter the Wowza Media Server live streaming application URL in the “FMS URL:” form entry. The URL will point to the Live application on your Wowza Media Server, and will look something like rtmp://media.institution.edu/live. Enter a name for your live stream as well. Then, click the Connect button to connect Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to your Wowza Media Server.
Once you’ve gotten all the settings tweaked and information entered, and you’ve connected to the Wowza Media Server, just click the green Start button to start streaming. You will see some stream statistics. When you are ready to kill the stream, just click on the red Stop button.
Cataloging and Publishing the Live Video with Ensemble Video
In Ensemble Video, it’s easy to create an entry for your live stream so that viewers can watch the video on a Windows PC or Macintosh, in a Flash-based player.
To catalog and publish the live stream in Ensemble Video, you will need to manually enter the URL of the live stream in the Ensemble Video Add/Edit wizard. The live stream will include the URL to the Live application on your Wowza Media Server along with the name of the live stream you’ve created, with an .flv extension. It will look something like this: rtmp://media.institution.edu/live/event.flv. For more information on how to enter the URL into Ensemble Video and catalog and publish your entry, see the blog entry on Managing and Publishing Live Streams with Ensemble Video.
Once you’ve got it all set up, you may also want to check out blog entries that show you how to:
Summary
It is fairly easy to set up live streaming with a combination of Wowza Media Server 2, Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder, and Ensemble Video. This blog entry explains how to do it in a few short steps.