Setting up a 360 live stream with the Headjack CMS generally consists of three parts.

  • Set-up an RTMP stream with your 360 Camera
  • Set-up a streaming cloud service and generate an HLS playlist
  • Injecting the live stream in an Headjack VR App

Set-up an RTMP stream with your 360 Camera

First, you have to set-up your 360 VR camera to output a pre-stitched RTMP stream. Luckily almost all modern 360 cameras have these options built-in right out of the box.

360 Live Stream Camera

You can find an example of how to set up an RTMP stream with an Insta 360 Titan here to get a general idea of the process.

Set-up a streaming cloud service and generate an HLS playlist.

Once you created the RTMP stream you have to push this to a cloud service that can generate a HLS playlist / .m3u8 URL. Several cloud providers can do this, such as Wowza, Akamai, and Windows Azure, to name a view. You can find some examples of these .m3u8 URL for testing here

These Cloud providers will all give you the options to encode your video in various qualities (the HLS playlist), so the Headjack app can switch between different video qualities depending on your end-users internet quality. We strongly advise you to play around with these settings in advance before you go live with the actual live stream.

Injecting the live stream in an Headjack VR App

Once you obtained the .m3u8 URL from your cloud provider, you can deliver the stream to the Headjack CMS.

  1. Navigate to Content > Media
  2. Click “+ New” > Live Stream
  3. Fill in if the Video Stream is Monoscopic or Stereoscopic or 180
  4. Fill in the Title of the Stream
  5. Fill in the .m3u8 Streaming URL
  6. Click “Save”
add HLS stream to a VR app

Now you delivered the Live Stream to the Headjack CMS we treat this stream like any other video in our platform. So you can update an existing app with a new project or update an existing project with this new live stream. 

For the next example, I will create an entirely new project on the App page, which I will add to an app that I already build and installed on my VR devices

  1. Navigate to Apps > All Apps > “App Name”
  2. Click “New Project”
  3. Fill in all the Project details
  4. Click “Select video”
  5. Locate the live stream in the file explore and click “Select”
  6. Click “Save”
  7. Click “Save” again on the app page
  8. Restart your App and Play the live stream
Add HLS stream to a VR Project

Live Streaming Spatial Audio

Headjack has support for streaming spatial audio in the AmbiX format so as long as you package 4 channel audio in your main video stream, we will detect it as spatial audio and render it as such in the VR app.