MediaLive - Start RTMP (output) push separately from channel start

Question

Our current understanding is that once a MediaLive channel is started, outputs begin to push immediately.

E.g. one RTMP output is YouTube, and once the channel is RUNNING the stream is immediately being pushed to YouTube

Is there a workflow that allows a channel to be in a 'preview' state before pushing to the outputs?
Where you can view your inputs, before pushing them.

Our current workaround is to have a MediaLive 'preview' channel for checking the quality of the feed. And once ready to go live, we start a second MediaLive 'live' channel to send the output to the destinations (and subsequently shutting down the preview channel). This is OK, but obviously, there is a delay in starting up each channel, and we are looking to enable being able to go from 'preview' to 'live' in a matter of seconds vs potentially a matter of minutes.

Answer

Hi Brodie-LIGR,

While not a "preview" option, you can always use the channel schedule functionality to pause one or both pipelines' outputs. You can schedule the pause/unpause in UTC time or issue an "immediate" pause/unpause which takes effect ASAP.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/medialive/latest/ug/schedule-fields-for-pause.html

Note that a pause affects all outputs on the pipeline.

Regards,
Steve

Answer

This is more of an observation than an answer.

The obvious answer is no there is no preview option. What we have noticed though is if there is no source there is no push. As an example we were tasked with a Live HLS Pull to RTMP Push. The ML instance would be started however it was not until the HLS link became active did the RTMP Push started.

One would think that it would just send null packets to the RTMP Server. Not true it sent nothing until the HLS link became active.

Speculation that if the RTMP Push was soured by an S3 file it would not started until the file on S3 was present.

MediaLive - Start RTMP (output) push separately from channel start

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