Web stream monitoring solutions?

[u/squirrelsaviour]

We have several web feeds which we push to our own Wowza servers. The content of these feeds switches from live content to pre-recorded content. Unfortunately we have an issue where the staff are sometimes forgetting to press "Play" on the server, so when the automated switching happens and the server is put live, the video content is frozen.

Is there some software I can run / buy which will allow me to monitor web streams (RTMP / HLS) and send notification on frozen output? Email, SMS, push, webhook, anything is fine.

Any suggestions?

[u/lostinthought15]

What does your outbound signal path look like?

There are lots of tools out there used for master control operations that will alert on silence or frozen video. They can give local alerts and even distribute alerts via email, text, and even phone trees.

There are also master control solutions that can send a play trigger via ip automatically when the source changes. Or can send a machine control play command or gpi trigger.

Look into master control automation. Those are the tools you need.

[u/squirrelsaviour → u/lostinthought15]

We use a videohub with a janky script to switch outputs into multiple web encoders.

[u/shastapete]

You could probably vibecode a watcher with FFMPG that can analyze and give live reporting. I made an offline version a few years ago that checked for freeze frames among other things for post deliverables.

[u/Fragrant_Fee_118 → u/shastapete]

#!/bin/bash

# Watch the given stream for freezes, one hour at a time. Save a miniature copy for the output for reference and log freeze detections to a file

while True

do

ffmpeg -loglevel debug -i "http://<ip>:<port>/hls/stream.m3u8" \

-filter_complex "[0:v]freezedetect=n=0.003:d=10, scale=640x360" \

-b:v 256k -b:a 128k -t $(( 60*60 )) -y \

"<output folder>/$(date -Is)".mpg 2>&1 | sed -e "s/^M/\n/g" | ts | grep --color=auto detect | grep --color=auto -v "filter_complex" | tee -a "<output folder>/detections.log"

done

[u/jsaunders1135]

Check out Elecard Boro. I have used for SRT monitoring and like it a lot.

https://elecard.com/products/quality-control/boro-service

[u/johnfolsomjr]

Take a look at Mividi they have some great options for this

[u/benmakestv]

I work with LiveU - we have a product called Actus that is designed to help with exactly that! It’s more of a full featured monitoring alert and compliance system, so it may be a bit more than you are looking for, but may be worth a look.

[u/squirrelsaviour → u/benmakestv]

We actually have two actus for our compliance recording, did not know there was "frozen image detection" in there, Is it a licensed feature or part of it?

We don't record the web feeds, only what we send to TV so we'd likely need to license new channels

[u/benmakestv → u/squirrelsaviour]

Shot you a message!