VLC error when Viewing Stream

[LMSD]

I am putting this out there just in case.....

Since TriCaster only supports Windows Media (mistake in my opinion should be a standard MP4 or h.264 stream (I stress STANDARD)) I wanted to use VLC to view and transcode the stream from my OSX box to multicast on my internal network as MP4.

I can an error with the video of the stream from withing VLC on OSX but the audio starts a few seconds later.

I can watch the stream using Window Media Player for OSX (no longer supported by MS) and the Flip4Mac Quicktime Plugin (3rd party WMV support for QuickTime). But since VLC cant view it, I can't do my transcode.

I will investigate using VLC on Windows as well, but support for protocols up to this point has been pretty straight across platforms in previous testings.

I really find NewTek's overall lack of QuickTime support to be rather troubling for an otherwise stellar product line.

-Mike

[LMSD]

VLC on OSX does not support WMV3 video Codec. I created a new streaming profile and dumbed the video down to Windows Media Player 7 and it works. I will try Windows Media Player 8 just to see if the quality would be just a bit better.

But VLC on OSX now sees it and I am successfully transcoding to MP4 on my network.

-Mike

[Zane Condren]

here is a link to WMV 9 for OSX

http://tinyurl.com/9rz5l

[LMSD]

I have the player itself, but that alone is not the issue....

Both the Windows Media Player and Flip4Mac QT Plug-in (now promoted by MS since they stopped development of WMP for OSX) work as they should.

However, my issue is that we use Quicktime Streaming Server and have a heavy Mac population (4500 machines to 600). So I already have the infrastructure in place to support Quicktime. Quicktime works better in Windows than WMP does on the Mac (not to mention full cross platform PArity that MS will never do with their products) I do not wish to re-invest time to bring in Windows Media nor do I wish to promote the format. I actually do not prefer Quicktime, but rather the fact that is supports MP4 and h.264 which are open protocols. Not to mention the fact that I can run Quicktime streaming server on just about any platform or server that I have handy.

So If you have VLC on Unix or OSX or Windows, you can watch the stream, if you have Quicktime on Windows or OSX you can watch the stream, but otherwise you are locked to WMP and basically the MS client on MS OS since we all know that WM on any other platform is simply 2nd rate.

I dont tolerate that in the least.

So with VLC I can do a few things. I can watch the stream, I can transcode the stream to MP4 or h.264 and I can save the stream to my HD as a local movie file in the MP4 or h.264 format. But if VLC can't view the stream, all that goes down the tubes.

If I change a profile to be Windows Media Player 8 (in the Windows Media Profile Editor on the TriCaster) and choose that new profile in the streamer settings, it works and VLC can do what it needs to do, but the keyframes are not correct (every second as NewTek has it set) and you can see the between keyframe pixelations in higher motion area's...the smearing is actually quite bad, but only in VLC..I know this is not NewTeks problem but it is worthy of a mention.

I would also support FLASH as a streaming format, as all platforms have flash support usually built in with no additional software needed to download.

-Mike