Alternative to My company is live broadcasting video podcasts now... audience participation is good for business and all that. Flash Media Live Encoder?

March 17, 2011 1:17 PM

Alternatives to Flash Media Live Encoder for Windows?

My company is live broadcasting video podcasts now... audience participation is good for business and all that.

Flash Media Live Encoder only broadcasts in two formats... one that doesn't seem to work with our computer hardware and H264.

We're getting an extreme video delay, which I've brought down from 20+ seconds to 5-6 seconds by changing the keyframe inteval to 1 second, but it looks like there's no way around the 5-6 second delay using H264 because of the complexity of the codec & the way it gets decoded on the viewer's end.

We're using Wowza Media Server- what alternative are there ... perhaps using older technologies than H264. We're also using Windows computers.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

posted by Muffy to computers & internet (2 answers total)

A 5 second delay is really pretty minimal. The only ways to cut that any more would be to change to a quicker codec in FMLE, reduce the resolution/frame rate, or throw more hardware at it, but I really don't think you're going to get get the delay down that much. A 'quicker' codec is also likely to mean more data to transfer, which can quickly become a problem.

If you're doing this all in one building, maybe some kind of CCTV setup could work, but with encoding -> internet ->decoding there's inevitably going to be some delay.
posted by jjb at 6:45 PM on March 17, 2011

Actually I hear that increasing the framerate decreases the delay- because the client gets more information faster so it can decode it faster, so 30fps is better than 15fps. I don't know if there's much benefit to going faster than 30.

I heard that the other FMLE codec (VP6) isn't much better, and also that a lot of the delay is caused on the player end- attempting to decode the complex h264 stream.

Thanks for the info, I'll keep researching. The people I'm working with are pretty sure they've seen smaller delays (delays are annoying in "real time" situations like Q&A).
posted by Muffy at 9:14 PM on March 17, 2011