Publishing with Transcoder

Publishing with Transcoder

If you do not have the capbility to use a Media Encoder, you can publish a single stream to the Transcoder on the server which will handle transcoding the stream into the additional variants. This scenario is more likely when broadcasting a WebRTC-enabled stream, though is also possible using the Flash-based publisher provided from the Red5 Pro HTML SDK.

Once the Provision is posted and stored on the Stream Manager, you will need to request the transcoder endpoint to broadcast the single stream to.

We recommend choosing the variant with highest stream quality settings as the stream to broadcast to the transcoder.

The Stream Manager API to request the transcoder endpoint is the same as the API to request an origin endpoint, yet has the additional &transcode=true query parameter. In following with the examples from this document, that would look like:

https://yourstreammanager.com/streammanager/api/3.1/event/live/mystream?action=broadcast&transcode=true

Note that the stream name is the top-level GUID of the stream Provision - and not a stream name of one of the variants. You will stream with a variant stream name, but this call to request the transcoder endpoint required the GUID.

The response JSON has the same structure as the response to request an Origin endpoint. You will use the serverAddress and scope of the response to start a publishing session. How that is assigned to each publisher type of the Red5 Pro HTML SDK differs in each solution (WebRTC and Flash/RTMP). This is detailed in the following subsections.