Help with "stream forwarding" RTSP to MPEG-TS

[Paul Anderegg]

I shoot night ENG for my local ABC station. We have MPEG-TS receivers for receiving live streams from Sony and JVC cameras, which I currently use. I am looking to deploy a newer Panasonic camera, but they use RTSP (ip/port).

Basically, I need a way to receive the RTSP stream on an internet connected Windows PC, then forward that stream back over the internet in MPEG-TS. The internet connection in question has typical upload speed of 5Mbps. The stream being received and forwarded on would typically be 0.5-0.8Mbps, in 360p or 480 SD. This setup would need to be able to auto forward a stream when it is received without any interaction. Encoder sees a stream, encoder sends said stream, but goes dark when stream is off. Possible?

Short of plopping down a few thousand dollars for a plug and play system such as a pair of Teradek Cubes, what option would I have available? What the heck is Wowza? So hard to find information on live streaming to things other than CDN's.

Paul

[Seth Bloombaum]

Wowza *is* a streaming server, and a bit of a swiss-army knife of stream conversions. Config it once and it will do your trick for a long time.

It's been a few years, it might have changed for the better, but when I was trying to make it work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) I was running into a big knowledge gap in server configuration and administration.

If you did get it configured right, perhaps with some help, you could leave it running all the time on AWS, or, boot it up on-demand and load (auto load?) your config file. On AWS you're leasing the space and server by the hour. Really inexpensive on-demand! Takes some know-how.

Wowza can be purchased for use on your own box, too. However, there are some real advantages to going cloud-based, and AWS is a great way to host Wowza.