Bringing in a generic H.264 stream to Wirecast (via Wowza and Wirecast’s Generic IP Camera support)

Wirecast is truly a studio in a box. It has a great support for multiple cameras, mixing live and recorded sources, graphic overlays and so on. Recent versions even allow you to bring in live feeds from IP cameras including support for specific Axis cameras.

Since I am a big fan of IP cameras and Axis in particular this is great news. Unfortunately Wirecast doesn’t have direct support for most models and I had to dig quite a bit to get things to work using their “Generic” IP camera support.

First test was to get a straight H.264 encoded into Wowza and then out to Wirecast. To do this, I used the Flash Media Live Encoder and set it publish to “rtmp://localhost:1935/img” (I have Wowza running on my local machine and an application called “img” which is a copy of Wowza’s “live” application). I set the Stream name in FMLE to “media.sav” which is what Wirecast is looking for by default.

In Wirecast’s Source Settings, I added a new IP Camera and set it’s IP address to: “127.0.0.1:1935” and choose “Generic” as the type.

Viola! It works, the video is being captured and encoded by FMLE, sent to Wowza and pulled into Wirecast as a Generic IP camera. In this manner, I can have live cameras via FMLE from anywhere in the world brought live into my final stream.

(Big thanks to Steve McFarlin the developer of the LiveU iPhone broadcasting app for his post on Wirecast’s Forum detailing how he got his software working.)

9 thoughts on “Bringing in a generic H.264 stream to Wirecast (via Wowza and Wirecast’s Generic IP Camera support)”

  1. Hey,

    I have been trying different ways for the past 3 months to find a way to get my h.264 IP cameras to show up in Wirecast as an input device, I even went through the trouble of writing my own ffmpeg source filter to try and get it to work.. though results weren’t great.

    This on the other hand works perfectly! I can get it to work by doing it in VLC too, it would be great if Wirecast had native support for people to input raw RTSP stream but I’m sure it’s on their to do list.

    This now allows me to get those cheapy 1080p IP cameras from ebay :)

    Thank you!

  2. Hey Jesse,

    Glad it is helpful! Unfortunately, it seems though that the resolution supported by Wirecast for the IP cameras is fixed to 320×240. Unfortunately, this made it unusable for my immediate purposes. Please do let me know if you find a way around this.

    Best,
    shawn

  3. Using VLC I can set the output rtsp stream to 1280×720 and wirecast sees it as 720p. The ip camera I have ATM is only 720p but I’d say 1080p would work fine. I think I have to fine tune the buffer or bitrate as the feed to wire cast works for about 1min then stops then 15-20 seconds later video comes through again. My source filter was pretty rubbish as my c# is very rusty. I will look more into it when I’m home from work.

  4. Oooh.. That’s cool. Wirecast is picking up the dimensions of the video from the stream. Perhaps I gave up too quickly and this is worth a look again.

    Love to know how it works out for you.

  5. I couldn’t overcome the (from what I guess) buffering issues, every now and then it would freeze for 15-20 seconds then the stream would start again.

    I decided to buy a licence of XSplit as it supports RTSP streams perfectly fine without any issues, I hope wirecast add the option for custom RTSP urls into their next release as I have given them a wall of a text in a support ticket.

    Fingers crossed.

  6. Hello,
    I have a question. Has anyone used wirecast 6.0.3? My IP cameras worked fine on 5.0, then I upgraded to 6.0.3 and now it will auto-detect them but it keeps saying my password is incorrect or the timing is off (which neither one is the case). I tried to add them manually, but I have no idea what a URI is and how to find it. I tried using the HTTP: link from the IP address, but that didn’t work wither. Please let me know if you can help.
    Thank you!

  7. Hi Suzie,

    Sorry to say that I haven’t had a chance to try it out with the latest versions of Wirecast. If you get it working though, please let us know.

    Best,
    shawn

  8. does anyone know what the error
    “failed to connect to URI” means and/or how to fix it.
    I have tried all versions of my rtmp server (Wowza)
    rtmp://IP:1935/live/strean_name without the port number
    and stream name and nothing seems to work.
    any help would be appreciated.
    on wirecast Ver. 6.0(234) 64 bit system.

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