Latency and especially high latency is one of the main problems when it comes to real time communication between a client and a server, so we decided to do some testing that would ultimately tell us which of the 3 main media-servers (AMS, Wowza and Red5) can achieve the lowest latency. The Testbed The testing was done using our flagship product, AVChat 3, for both client and server side as application. The client side of AVChat was installed on a local machine in Romania. The local machine has the following processing and memory specifications: Intel i5 CPU @ 3.30Ghz and 8 GB of RAM, on a Windows 7 x64 OS. For the media server I’ve used a VPS located in[…]
Category: Wowza
Wowza Media Systems has released their new major Wowza Media Server version: Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0. This latest version adds a completely new GUI that allows the user to control and fine tune the server and individual applications without navigating the Wowza folder structure, going through .xml configuration files or restarting the media server every time you make a change. This new GUI is officially called Wowza Streaming Engine Manager, it’s browser based and can be accessed by going to this URL address http://WOWZA_SERVER_ADDRESS:8088/enginemanager/ The GUI is split in 4 areas: Homepage dashboard Server Applications Help Let’s look at each one of them in detail: 1. The Homepage The homepage gives a quick overview of the most important statistics: Number of incoming and[…]
Wowza Media Systems just announced their new major Wowza Media Server version: Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0. Besides the new name there’s a new GUI that allows you to control the server and individual applications. Think Adobe’s Media Server Console on steroids. Mike Talvensaari, VP of Producs at Wowza, gives a quick overview of the new product and GUI in this video posted on the new Wowza website. You can also check out the new GUI by singing up for the online demo. Here are 2 quick screenshots with the Home and Application pages of the new GUI : We’re currently testing AVChat, HDFVR and FLVAR on the new Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0 to check for compatibility issues. We’ll get back to you with[…]
Hello, my name is Remus and i am a new employee at AVChat Software. I will be from now on , the main developer for AVChat 3.0 and build 1772 is my first build, and the one that helped me understand the inner workings of how it was developed so far. I hope i managed to implement a useful set of new features along with the other developers, and that we will continue to do so in the future. Here are the major changes we did for you in this build: We added a new feature that allows users to filter NSFW (not safe for work) content through the setting userCanSeeNSFWContent in avc_settings.xxx. This feature has 3 types of filtering:[…]
I am going to explain in this blog post how video quality functions in flash video chat apps. Understanding the steps the video quality goes trough in its travel from the broadcaster to the viewer is vital when trying to raise the general video quality experienced by your users. This tutorial applies to AVChat, AVConference, SimplChat but also in some extent to HDFVR and AVChat IM. So, here we go. The journey of the video from the broadcaster to the viewer can be imagined as a funnel with 8 steps. At each step the video quality can suffer. To increase the video quality at the end (on the viewer’s side) you can take measures at every step. Step 1: the[…]
Just a few days ago I was alarmed on the forum that many users of AVChat started getting the error in the title out of the blue without the chat webmasters doing anything. After a quick investigation we had found the culprit. It seems Adobe has modified something in their latest Flash Player Update (11.1.102.62). August 2012 update: it seems the issue also shows up in FP 10.3.183.20 released on 06 August 2012. teh patches at the bottom do not fx the issue for FP 10.3.183.20 . They modified the contents of the pageUrl variable sent by Flash Player when it connects to a media server like FMS, Red5 or Wowza. In FP 11.1.102.55 (released on November 7th, 2011) pageUrl[…]
We’re doing a small new build today of AVChat in an attempt to fix some of the issues that have popped up since our last build, here they are in no certain order: fixed issue with showWhoisInfoIntextChatArea in avc_settings.xxx not working silent ban was not working on Wowza profileCountryFlag in avc_settings.xxx was not working on Wowza added protections against several errors reported on Wowza fixed issue with the number of unread messages not showing up in tabs inside AVChat fixed issue with bans not showing up in admin.swf when used with Red5 (admin.swf increased to 600kbytes ) empty connection string in avc_settings.asp We’ve also added a few new features here and there: duration GET variable in seconds is now added[…]
Why a connection attempt to a working media server might fail: Red5, FMIS and Wowza by default only accept rtmp connections over port 1935. This will work fine for most home Internet connections however when your user is behind a corporate firewall/network he might hit 2 major restrictions: NO traffic/connections to non standard ports like 1935 (default port for rtmp). Traffic is only allowed to standard ports like 80 (http) and 443 (https) . The solution for this is to configure the media server to accept rtmp connections over ports 443 and 80 . NO non-http traffic allowed (or a proxy server is used). The solution for this is to configure the media server to accept rtmpt connections. Rtmpt is[…]
Error 1: If, when trying to connect using AVChat 3, you are getting this error message: Connection failed, media server might be down or firewall might be blocking the connection! like this: You need to check: your rtmp connection string inserted in avc_settings.xxx the media server might not be running (you can check if Red5 is running by going to http://yourred5server.com:5080/) the media server might have not started properly (thus is not running, you can check the logs in Red5/log for any ERROR messages during startup) there is a firewall on the media server blocking TCP traffic over port 1935 (and 5080) the user trying to connect is behind a firewall that blocks the connection (either a personal one installed on[…]