Wowza Media Server V3 for Amazon EC2

November 6, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  Cloud Computing, streaming, Wowza

Wowza V3 pre-built AMIs are now available – The devpay licensing remains, as does the pricing. The new AMI listing can be found at the Wowza V3 for EC2 page. Wowza has also added pre-built AMIs for subscription licenses, which are priced at standard instance rates. The caveat is that on devpay, the premium add-on modules won’t be available – if all you’re doing is what you were doing on V2, that won’t change anything for you.

The license key instances can also be used as a basis for your own custom images. License key can either be manually changed or included in your startup packages.

NACBA Admin Day

October 20, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  Church IT

Here’s the list of resources from this morning’s presentation on Social Media 201 at the KC chapter of #NACBA Admin Day. I’ll add stuff periodically if I run across anything particularly interesting.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be complete without a plug – if your church has any IT needs that aren’t being met, head on over to my company at nerdherd.net

Hands On: Vizio Tablet (Part 1: Initial Impressions)

October 14, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  Hardware

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that Costco is selling an 8″ Android tablet from Vizio (Model VTAB1008) for the very attractive price of $234.99. Unfortunately, their merchandising is somewhat lacking as this is a Wi-Fi only tablet, and there’s no Wi-Fi to speak of at Costco (and, as it turns out, the demo mode on them won’t allow Wi-Fi anyway!). I remembered today that Costco has a very generous 90-day return policy, which should give me ample opportunity to put one of these units through its paces, and picked one up.

The specs:

  • 802.11n Wifi
  • Bluetooth
  • GPS
  • HDMI Out
  • MicroSD slot
  • 4GB onboard storage (about 2.4 GB is available to the user)
  • 1 GHz Processor
  • Front facing camera (VGA)
  • Universal Remote App
  • 1024×768 screen
  • Lifetime tech support

What’s inside:

  • The tablet
  • Wall charger and cable (standard USB-microUSB)
  • Screen cloth
  • Quick Start Manual (full manual preloaded on the device)

Hardware:

  • Power button on the top, in the middle, flanked with a pair of speakers
  • Volume buttons on the right side
  • MicroUSB and HDMI on the bottom, in the middle, with the SD slot to the left and another speaker to the right – this is so that your audio still sounds right in landscape orientation.
  • There’s a back on it that looks like the battery may be user-accessible.

Initial impressions:

  • This thing seems a little dense for its size, but it’s not bad. The unit weighs in at 20.6 ounces (584 grams). The screen is reasonably bright.
  • When you fire up the tablet (and it came with a more than reasonable 80% battery charge), you go through a simple 5-step setup process that instructs you on general UI usage, connecting to Wi-Fi, and linking up to your Google account. Almost immediately after the setup, the device informed me of an available firmware update that added Netflix and some Android updates. Unfortunately, the device comes with Gingerbread and not Honeycomb.
  • There are 3 soft buttons on the bottom of the screen, the “return” button, a vizio logo, and the “menu” button. The Vizio logo is meant to be the home button, but that’s not particularly obvious (I purposely skipped the UI intro to see how intuitive things would be to someone who uses an Android phone and who has used an iPad)

Preloaded Apps:

  • The usual set of Googly stuff
  • A universal remote control app
  • Barnes & Noble’s Nook app
  • Adobe Flash Player 11
  • Netflix (with the OTA update)
  • Widget Board
The Android market comes up with a UI that looks suspiciously like Microsoft Windows Phone. I installed my usual set of apps, and they work quite nicely.

Weird quirks:

There’s a set of buttons across the bottom on the UI labeled “Browser”, “Market”, “Email”, “Gallery”, and “Music”. Oddly enough, even if you’ve set up your google account, the “Email” button runs you through another setup, asking if the account is IMAP, POP3, or Exchange. Has nothing to do with the gMail app.
Connecting to USB presents you with a file structure that isn’t really clearly documented. Tried copying a video over, but had to use a file browser app to actually locate it.

Really cool stuff:

I dropped an XVID-encoded AVI file onto the storage, and once I was able to locate it (see above), It played. No fuss, no muss, no conversions. This is a pretty standard format for the sorts of video you’d find on the internet (so I’ve heard), so this is really convenient if you have lots of content in that format.

The on-screen keyboard is nice to use, especially coming from a phone-sized android keyboard.

Kindle on this screen is NICE. This could make a pretty good alternative to the Fire.

The size on this unit is about perfect… A little bigger than the 7-inch “mini tablets”, but not as obnoxiously big as a 10″ tablet like a Xoom or iPad.

Screen at full brightness is actually too bright to use indoors.

The soft buttons are also present on the side of the unit. The correct set lights up based on orientation

Audio is excellent.

In combination with CoPilot Live, this could make a kick-butt car GPS.

Meh stuff:

The camera sucks. This is unsurprising. It’ll work fine for video chat, which is its primary purpose.

UI Animations are a little sluggish. They can be turned off, though.

Viewing angles from top and right (portrait) / top and left (landscape) leave something to be desired.

tl;dr version

Decent tablet for the money, probably usable by your grandmother. Onboard storage is adequate for someone not using it as a media device. Expandable storage solves that problem. Good support for multiple media formats. Makes a good e-reader.

Wowza V3 Costs for churches

October 11, 2011 |   |  4 Comments  |  streaming, Wowza

In my previous post, I mentioned that Wowza’s licensing is changing for EC2-based instances. Naturally, this is going to have an effect on how much it costs. I’m going to break down the numbers for a typical church scenario.

The assumptions I’m going to make are based on usage patterns for Resurrection Online:

  • 1 full-time server
  • 2 services on Sunday, approx. 2 hours each,
  • 2 repeaters per service
  • 1000GB traffic/month
  • US-East zone

Under the current V2 scenario with DevPay, you have the following costs:

  • Full-time instance: 720 hours @ 0.15/hr : $108
  • Repeaters: 32 hours @ 0.15/hr : $4.80
  • Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.15/GB: $150.00
  • Wowza AMI Access: $5

Total: $267.80/month

Under V3, it looks like this:

  • Full-time instance: 720 hours @ $0.085/hr : $61.20
  • Monthly Wowza License: $55
  • Monthly nDVR Add-On License: $20
  • Repeaters: 32 hours @ $0.085/hr: $2.72
  • Daily Wowza License @ $5/day/repeater: $40
  • Daily nDVR License @ $2/day/repeater: $16
  • Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.12/GB: $120.00

Total: $278.92 ($314.92 with nDVR)

Pretty close… But because V3 is no longer tied to DevPay, you have the freedom of using reserved instances. I’ll assume you won’t do a reserved instance for the repeaters.

  • Full-time instance: 720 hours @ $0.03/hr : $21.60
  • Monthly Wowza License: $55
  • Monthly nDVR License: $20
  • Repeaters: 32 hours @ $0.085/hr: $2.72
  • Daily Wowza License @ $5/day/repeater: $40
  • Daily nDVR License @ $2/day/repeater: $16
  • nDVR License:
  • Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.12/GB: $120.00

Subtotal: $239.32 ($273.92 with nDVR)

  • Reserved instance fee – 1 year: $227.50 ($18.96/month) : $ 258.28
  • Reserved instance fee – 3 years : $350 ($9.72/month) : $249.04

Additional repeaters will set you back about $6/day extra ($8 with nDVR)

Summary:

  • V2: 267.80/month
  • V3: 278.92/month
  • V3 (1 year reserved): 258.28/month
  • V3 (3 year reserved): 249.04/month
  • nDVR on V3 will add $36/month

As you can see, the economics of this have been turned on their ear – now, instead of multiple small servers being the most cost-effective method of doing repeaters, it now makes sense to spin up one or two considerably larger instances for a couple of hours. If each small costs you $5.16  for two hours, and gains you 150Mbps, it looks a lot better to supersize your instance for about 9 bucks for two hours and get several gigabits out of it. When the folks at Wowza get done benchmarking the EC2 instances with V3, I’ll post another entry.

 

Hot off the presses: Wowza Media Server Version 3

October 9, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  streaming, Wowza

** UPDATED INFORMATION : 6 November 2011 **

After many months of hard work, the team at Wowza put the finishing touches on the latest major release of Wowza Media Server. The new version adds a couple of key features in the form of licensed add-ons:

  • Network DVR:
    • Wowza nDVR AddOn (Beta release) is an innovative live stream cache that stores content in a normalized format accessible to Wowza Media Server 3 for any-screen HTTP playout. Compared to client-specific nDVR implementations, Wowza nDVR significantly reduces cost by minimizing network storage requirements and simplifying the delivery workflow for all screens. Wowza nDVR enables Wowza licensees to increase revenues and viewer engagement by delivering live linear streams as time-shifted services with features like live pause, rewind, and resume.
  • Live Transcoding:
    • Wowza Transcoder AddOn takes advantage of the same hardware as the server to transform incoming live streams from encoders, IP cameras, IPTV headends, and other live sources into multiple stream sets ‘done right’ for H.264-everywhere adaptive bitrate delivery. Adaptive bitrate streaming is supported for Flash RTMP and HTTP Dynamic Streaming, Apple HLS, and Silverlight Smooth Streaming. Wowza Transcoder also delivers non-adaptive streams over any transport protocol supported by Wowza Media Server 3, including RTMP, RTSP/RTP, MPEG-TS, and HTTP.
  • DRM Integration
    • Wowza DRM AddOn provides simultaneous secure key exchange with multiple DRM platforms such as Verimatrix VCAS and Microsoft PlayReady. Individual live or on-demand content is encrypted on-the-fly for HLS and Silverlight delivery to viewers on a wide range of devices including set-top boxes (STBs), connected TVs, smartphones and tablets. Wowza DRM AddOn can help users up-sell content for OTT premium services, and cross-sell content for multi-device distribution.

The other key feature is a change in the subscription license model, adding a daily license in addition to the monthly license. The subscription licenses are allowed to be used on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. The monthly subscription license has also seen a price reduction (there are also tiered price breaks on the monthly subscription). The subscription license is based on the number of instances you start during a given day or month. This is likely to be the new licensing model for EC2, moving away from Amazon’s DevPay model which required a monthly subscription as well as limiting instances to S3-backed images that couldn’t take advantage of Amazon’s reserved instances. By using a subscription license, you still get the scalability of the Amazon cloud, but the flexibility of using an instance type and OS that works for you. As of the release this week, there are no pre-built EC2 images for Wowza V3, but they’re coming soon. Wowza Media Server V3 Overview (PDF) Wowza Media Server V3 User’s Guide (PDF) Wowza Media Server V3 Pricing Wowza Media Server V3 Add-Ons

Grabbing thumbnails from Wowza

October 8, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  streaming, Wowza

Here’s a quick and dirty way to grab a thumbnail from a Wowza application:

rtmpdump -v -B 0.01 -r rtmp://wowza.server/application/stream -o temp.flv
ffmpeg -i temp.flv -vframes 1 -s qvga /var/www/frame.jpg

There’s also a way to do it with a Wowza module, but it’s considerably more complex and not for the faint of Java.

Caveat: This likely won’t work if you have hotlink denial turned on on your stream.

 

’tis the season for change…

September 1, 2011 |   |  2 Comments  |  Personal

This weekend is Labor Day in the US, which typically signals the end of “cultural summer” (as opposed to astronomical or climatological summers, which still have several weeks left around here). It’s also the end of one season of my life and the beginning of another.

For the last five years, I’ve been on the IT staff at Resurrection, and seen a tremendous amount of change, and learned an awful lot about an industry that I didn’t even realize existed five years ago. It’s now time for me to move on. Today at staff chapel, I announced that I will be leaving my current position on October 6, and venturing off to start my own consulting business where I can apply much of what I learned at Resurrection and share that knowledge with smaller churches and businesses who don’t have an IT staff. It is a calling I’ve been feeling for some time now, and it’s time to make the terrifying leap.

The next several weeks will be a whirlwind of winding down at Resurrection, and winding up a new business. I’m gonna get a crash course in accounting, business law, trademarks, and whatnot.

I still plan on being active in CITRT (you all are like extended family!), and showing up to as many events as time and money permit.If you know of a church or small business in and around Kansas and Missouri that has IT needs, please pass the word that I’m happy to help. I’ll post further details in this space as the website comes online.

(oh, and Resurrection is going to be needing another network administrator. Let me know if you know someone who might fit the bill)

Browser-aware player code, revisited

August 24, 2011 |   |  2 Comments  |  streaming, Wowza

I posted a while back about selecting video players based on browsers… It was an ugly javascript hack, and since then LongTail has updated their excellent JWPlayer to support multiple methods. In order to create an embed that worked best for supporting both HTML5 and Flash players, I had to dig through the documentation a little bit, and combine a couple of different sections.

Here’s how to embed JWPlayer 5.7 to try flash first, with multiple bitrates, and then attempt HTML5 if Flash is not supported. This particular scenario is for iOS support.

<script type="text/javascript" src="jwplayer.js"></script>

<div id="container">Loading the player ...</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
        jwplayer("container").setup({
                height: 360,
                width: 480,
                image: "http://server.com/images/thumbnail.jpg",
                skin: "bekle.zip",
                modes: [
                        {
                        type: "flash",
                        src: "player.swf",
                        config: {
                                levels: [
                                        { bitrate: 250, file: "playlist-low", width: 320 },
                                        { bitrate: 500, file: "playlist-high", width: 480 }
                                        ],
                                streamer: "rtmp://streamer.com:1935/live",
                                provider: "rtmp"
                                }
                        },
                        {
                        type: "html5",
                        config: {
                                file: "http://streamer.com/live/ipad.smil/playlist.m3u8"
                                }
                        } ]
                }
        );
</script>

This still doesn’t support RTSP and other HTML5  fallbacks due to limitations in JWPlayer, so if you’re on a BlackBerry, you’ll still need to switch the player. The order that the “type” statements appear in the javascript determines the order in which they’ll be tried. Generally, you’ll want to try Flash first, otherwise browsers that support HTML5 but not Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (which is pretty much all of them), will default to the HTML5 player, but be unable to get the stream. You can, however, provide multiple video sources with different codecs (for on-demand content) to support the different flavors of browsers, though.

Windows Updates to go… not so much?

August 15, 2011 |   |  1 Comment  |  Haiti, IT

I posted a few weeks ago about bringing a WSUS machine down to Haiti as a sort of proxy – unfortunately, this project turned out to be a bust.

Conceptually, it worked. Machines were getting updates, and everything was great… until it started blowing out the CMOS settings and bluescreening a couple times a day. I suspect it’s probably power-related, but in any case, it was far from stable enough to leave unattended.