Live Audio Broadcast Using Wowza Media Server

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Wowza for Live Audio Broadcast : A Brief Overview

Wowza Media Server is a popular, Java-based streaming server used for streaming live and on-demand audio and video content for consumption on various client platforms like PC, iPhone, Android, etc.

Wowza provides a lot of features out of the box. Its written in Java and can be extended by writing components in Java
In order to stream live radio, Neev uses a Flex based client that captures the audio input from users microphone and sends the same to Wowza Server for broadcasting This needs knowledge of Flex API and ActionScript For listening to the live stream, one can use JWPlayer (for Flash-based browsers) or HTML5 for iPhone/iPAD browsers

Setting up Wowza Media Server

Setting up Wowza Media Server comprises a few simple steps : Assuming we have a Wowza Media Server already installed, we need to setup an application under Wowza Media Server. Lets call this liveradio. To do this: 1. Create a folder named liveradio under Wowza installations application directory 2. Create a folder named liveradio under Wowza installations conf directory 3. Create a file named Application.xml by copying an existing file from conf directory 4. Open the newly created Application.xml and modify the value of /Root/Streams/StreamType node to live

5. Restart Wowza server

Coding the Flex Client for Broadcasting

Coding the Flex Client for an audio broadcast would need very good understanding of Flex API and ActionScript (AS).

You will need to setup an ActionScript project.

An IDE like FlashDevelop can be used for the same.

The typical steps you need to follow to capture audio and send to Wowza are
given in the next few slides.

Setting up the Microphone

The screenshot below links to AS code for setting up the microphone. Please click on it to view it on the respective blog page.

Setting up the Network Connection

We need to set up the Network Connection to send captured audio data to Wowza server.

(The screenshot below links to relevant code. Please click on it to view it.)

Creating a Page for Playing to the Live Broadcast

The broadcasted audio can be played by using a flash based player or HTML5 audio-tag based on the browser. One can also use a player like JWPlayer that can embed audio/video in Flash format with HTML5 fallback. Any other flv player that supports RTMP streaming can also be used. The code has two configurations viz RTMP and HTML5. RTMP is supported in browsers that allow content in flash. Since both iPhone and iPad do not support Flash content therefore one must fall back on HTML5 and use the Cupertino streaming support for iPAD and iPhone. (Please click on the code below to reach our blog which contains the code)

Challenges and How They Were Overcome

The streams published from the flex based client is in RTMP format and it can be streamed to a RTMP/Flash based player only

SPEEX, which is the audio codec used, needs to be converted to an H.264 compatible codec
like AAC . This can then be played on an iPhone/iPAD

There are two ways to do the same

Firstly, one could use an AddOn like Wowza Transcoder or a tool like FFMPEG

The Wowza Transcoder works on only 64-bit machines with 64-bit Java, whereas FFMPEG is OpenSource and could be used on 32-bit machines

Wowza Transcoder AddOn

The Wowza Transcoder AddOn can transcode any configured incoming stream from one format to another. Here we encoded our live audio format codec from SPEEX to AAC. Heres how to do this:

1. Setup Wowza Transcoder AddOn. The AddOn works only on 64-bit machines.
2. Create a transcoder template audio_speex.xml in Wowzas transcoder/templates folder as shown in the linked content below. (Please click on it to reach the blog which contains the code)

3. Edit Application.xml and set /Root/Transcoder/Templates to ${SourceStreamName}_speex.xml, transrate.xml

4. The Wowza Transcoder Add-on is quite powerful and can transcode the incoming streams to multiple formats and bit rates for consumption on different types of players and devices with varying bandwidths.

FFMPEG : Simple Command Line Tool for Transcoding

FFmpeg is a set of tools to record, play and convert audio and video from/to various formats It can be used with Wowza Media Server to encode the live audio stream from our application from SPEEX to AAC codec Below are the steps to get it working with Wowza: 1. Install FFmpeg for the respective platform. This is a challenging task as FFmpeg has a lot of dependencies. It will usually get installed using yum on CentOS or aptitude get install on Ubuntu. Make sure FFmpeg is configured with enable-librtmp and enable-libfaac. Run ffmpeg command without any arguments if these are enabled. 2. Start broadcasting the audio from the flex client 3. Run the below command to transcode the live stream called audio from Wowza and make it available as another stream called audio_ios for playing on iPhone/iPAD ffmpeg -i rtmp:///liveradio/audio -acodec libfaac -vcodec copy -f flv rtmp:///liveradio/audio_ios

Extending Current Setup to Include Video

This setup can be extended easily to stream live video along with audio. This can be done as follows: 1. In your flex client, the Camera will be setup just like the Microphone was in the above example and the same will be attached to the flash NetStream 2. The JWPlayer code is modified so that the provider for html2 is video instead of sound

Wowza Use Cases at Neev

We at Neev Technologies have successfully used Wowza Media Server for applications involving on-demand streaming of movies/TV programs, live audio/video streaming. In addition there are other use cases like live re-streaming/recording of IP camera streams, live video/chat where we see Wowza as a great fit. Some applications were deployed on a single node and some used Origin-

Edge cluster for high load and scalability.

Using the Java API we were also able to customize Wowza to add additional security features like time based expiry of stream URLs.

Click here to read this blog post on the Neevtech blog.

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