Wowza Streaming Engine

Last updated
Wowza Streaming Engine
Developer(s) Wowza
Stable release
4.8.28+4, build 20240709173404 / July 10, 2024;2 months ago (2024-07-10) [1]
Operating system Java-based, platform agnostic: Linux, macOS, Solaris, Unix, Windows
Type Media Software Server
License Proprietary
Website Official website

Wowza Streaming Engine (known as Wowza Media Server prior to version 4) is a unified streaming media server software developed by Wowza. The server is used for streaming of live and on-demand video, audio, and rich Internet applications over IP networks to desktop, laptop, and tablet computers, mobile devices, IPTV set-top boxes, internet-connected TV sets, game consoles, and other network-connected devices. The server is a Java application deployable on most operating systems.

Contents

History

Version 1.0.x was released on February 19, 2007. [2] This version was originally offered as an alternative to the Adobe Flash Media Server, and supported streamed video, audio and RIA’s for the Flash Player client playback and interaction based on the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) using content encoded with Spark and VP6 codecs. The original product name was Wowza Media Server Pro.

Version 1.5.x was released on May 15, 2008 [3] and added support for H.264 video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio, and ingest support for Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS), and ICY (SHOUTcast/Icecast) sources for re-streaming to the Flash Player client.

Version 2.0.x was released on December 17, 2009. [4] The product name was changed to Wowza Media Server 2. This version added outbound H.264 streaming support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming protocol for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, etc.), Microsoft HTTP Smooth Streaming for Silverlight player, RTSP/RTP for QuickTime Player and mobile devices based on Android, BlackBerry (RIM), Symbian (Symbian Foundation), Palm webOS (now owned by HP), and other platforms, and TV set-top boxes and video game consoles.

Version 3.0.x was released on October 7, 2011. This version added network DVR, Live transcoding, and DRM plug-in functionality.

Version 3.5 was released on November 7, 2012. This version added Closed Captioning [5] and a Silverlight Multicast Player. Live Stream Record and Media Security, previously additional features external to the software, were incorporated into the server software. Media Security DRM plugins with Verimetrix VCAS, Microsoft PlayReady, BuyDRM KeyOS Services, EZDRM Hosted DRM, AuthenTec DRM Fusion. Wowza also released Wowza StreamLock free AddOn which provides 256-bit SSL for RTMPS and HTTPS. The release included enhancements to Wowza Transcoder AddOn; transcoder overlays that can be used for advertising, tilting, watermarks and tickers. Other new features include B-frame support, Dolby Digital Plus (EAC3) pass-through for HLS, MPEG-DASH, HTTP Origin.

Version 3.6 was released June 10, 2013. Wowza Media Server 3.6 added basic support for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Expanded support for closed captioning formats for live and video-on-demand streams.

Version 4.0 was released February 11, 2014. The product name was changed to Wowza Streaming Engine. This release includes a new web-based graphical interface which interacts with the server via a REST API and provides monitoring and configuration functions. This release also brings full support for MPEG-DASH and support for additional for captioning formats. Previously available separately, the MediaCache and Push Publishing add-on modules are now included in the server.

Version 4.2 was released on June 16, 2015. This release included the Stream Targets feature in Wowza Streaming Engine Manager, enabling you to send an incoming live source stream to one or more destinations that re-distribute the source stream to users. Stream target destinations allow you to scale and add redundancy to your live streaming workflow.

Version 4.3 was released on October 6, 2015. New functionality included full access to the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API. [6] You can use the REST API to configure, manage, and monitor the media server through HTTP requests.

Version 4.7.3 was released on November 14, 2017. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.3 software added support for Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) in Wowza Streaming Engine media servers on Linux and Windows operating systems. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.3 also introduced the ability to create a generic stream target that sends an SRT stream from Wowza Streaming Engine to destinations such as content delivery networks (CDNs) and streaming services for distributed delivery.

Version 4.7.6 was released on July 31, 2018. New functionality included support for MPEG-DASH with nDVR. The Wowza nDVR feature enables you to record a live stream with Wowza Streaming Engine while simultaneously allowing users to play or pause the live stream, rewind it to a previously recorded point, or resume viewing at the current live point.

Version 4.7.7 was released on November 13, 2018. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.7 added support for WebRTC. Wowza Streaming Engine can ingest source WebRTC audio and video content and deliver it to supporting players. It can also transmux or transcode WebRTC to other streaming protocols, including Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, RTMP, RTSP, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming.

Version 4.7.8 was released November 5, 2019. Added functionality included support for Low-Latency HLS. Wowza Streaming Engine can now generate Low-Latency HLS live streams. Wowza Streaming Engine now also supports Common Media Application Format (CMAF), the open, extensible standard that enables efficient streaming using the HLS and MPEG-DASH protocols.

Version 4.8 was released February 18, 2020. The update added full support for WebRTC and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) streaming; the addition of the CMAF packetizer for MPEG-DASH, HLS, and Low-Latency HLS streaming; and added support for recording MPEG-DASH live streams with the nDVR feature.

Version 4.8.5 was released June 17, 2020. Extensive updates were added related to WebRTC including improved accuracy of RTCP feedback messages for adaptive encoding. There is now support for SRT version 1.4 and EXT-X-PRELOAD-HINT media playlist tag for Low Latency HLS. The new version also increased security. [7]

Formats

Wowza Streaming Engine can stream to multiple types of playback clients and devices simultaneously, including the Adobe Flash player, Microsoft Silverlight player, Apple QuickTime Player and iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), mobile phones, IPTV set-top boxes (Amino, Apple TV, Enseo, Fire TV, Roku, Streamit and others), [8] and game consoles such as Wii, Xbox, and PS4.

Wowza Streaming Engine is compatible with standard streaming protocols. On the playout side, these include RTMP (and the variants RTMPS, RTMPT, RTMPE, RTMPTE), HDS, HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, RTSP, Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-TS (unicast and multicast). On the live ingest side the server can ingest video and audio via RTP, RTSP, RTMP, MPEG-TS (unicast and multicast), ICY (SHOUTcast / Icecast) and WebRTC streams.

In 2017 Wowza and Haivision created SRT Alliance to develop and promote an open-source SRT protocol for low latency reliable-UDP delivery. [9]

For on-demand streaming, Wowza Streaming Engine can ingest multiple types of audio and video files. Supported file types include MP4 (QuickTime container - .mp4, .f4v, .mov, .m4a, .m4v, .mp4a, .mp4v, .3gp, and .3g2), FLV (Flash Video - .flv), and MP3 content (.mp3).

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

The Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams over a suitable transport protocol. RTSP is used in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers. The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between endpoints. Clients of media servers issue commands such as play, record and pause, to facilitate real-time control of the media streaming from the server to a client or from a client to the server.

Helix DNA was a project to produce computer software that can play audio and video media in various formats and aid in creating such media. It was intended as a largely free and open-source digital media framework compatible with numerous operating systems and processors and it was started by RealNetworks, which contributed much of the code. The Helix Community was an open collaborative effort to develop and extend the Helix DNA platform. The Helix Project has been discontinued.

Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.

Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a communication protocol for streaming audio, video, and data over the Internet. Originally developed as a proprietary protocol by Macromedia for streaming between Flash Player and the Flash Communication Server, Adobe has released an incomplete version of the specification of the protocol for public use.

Darwin Streaming Server (DSS) was the first open sourced RTP/RTSP streaming server. It was released March 16, 1999 and is a fully featured RTSP/RTP media streaming server capable of streaming a variety of media types including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 Part 2 and 3GP.

HTTP Live Streaming is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. and released in 2009. Support for the protocol is widespread in media players, web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming media servers. As of 2022, an annual video industry survey has consistently found it to be the most popular streaming format.

The Helix Universal Media Server was a product developed by RealNetworks and originates from the first streaming media server originally developed by Progressive Networks in 1994. It supported a variety of streaming media delivery transports including MPEG-DASH RTMP (flash), RTSP (standard), HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft Silverlight and HTTP Progressive Download enabling mobile phone OS and PC OS media client delivery.

Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique used in streaming multimedia over computer networks.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.

Unreal Media Server is a streaming server software created by Unreal Streaming Technologies.

Red5 is a free software media streaming server implemented in Java, which provides services similar to those offered by the proprietary Adobe Flash Media Server and Wowza Streaming Engine including:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OBS Studio</span> Screen recording and streaming app

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Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a W3C specification that allows JavaScript to send byte streams to media codecs within web browsers that support HTML video and audio. Among other possible uses, this allows the implementation of client-side prefetching and buffering code for streaming media entirely in JavaScript. It is compatible with, but should not be confused with, the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification, and neither requires the use of the other, although many EME implementations are only capable of decrypting media data provided via MSE.

Bitmovin is a multimedia technology company which provides services that transcode digital video and audio to streaming formats using cloud computing, and streaming media players. Founded in 2013, the Austrian company contributes to MPEG-DASH, an open standard that allows streaming video to be played in HTML video and Flash Video web players.

Nimble Streamer is a software media server developed by Softvelum. The server is used for streaming of live and on-demand video and audio to desktop computers, mobile devices, internet-connected TV sets, IPTV set-top boxes and other network-connected devices. Its first stable version 1.0.0-1 was released on October, 21st, 2013, with a number of preliminary versions done before that. The release cycle is intensive and introduces a new version every week or less. Nimble Streamer was the finalist in Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards for 2016 as the Best Streaming Innovation and for 2021 as Hardware/software Server.

Web Call Server is unified intermedia server software developed by Flashphoner. It is a server-side platform, implemented in Java, dedicated for streaming video over wide range of communication protocols, including:

Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) is an open source video transport protocol that utilises the UDP transport protocol. The SRT Protocol specification is available as an Internet Draft from the IETF.

OvenMediaEngine (OME) is a low-latency streaming server with large-scale and high-definition that AirenSoft Co., Ltd. released as open-source software via GitHub in December 2018. The main programming language used was C++, and the first update was on May 23, 2019.

References

  1. ↑ "Wowza Streaming Engine Software Updates". wowza.com. Wowza. Retrieved 2024-10-02. he latest Wowza Streaming Engine production build is Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.28+4, build 20240709173404 released on July 10, 2024.
  2. ↑ (Press Release) "Wowza Media Server Pro 1.0". wowzamedia.com.
  3. ↑ (Press Release) "Wowza Media Server Pro 1.5". wowzamedia.com.
  4. ↑ "Wowza Media Server 2.0 Press Release". wowzamedia.com.
  5. ↑ "Streaming Media - Closed Caption". streamingmedia.com. 2012-11-27.
  6. ↑ "Wowza Streaming Engine REST API documentation". www.wowza.com. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  7. ↑ "About Wowza Streaming Engine updates". www.wowza.com. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  8. ↑ "(Press Release) Wowza Media Server 3.1 to be at Streaming Media East 2012". broadcastengineering.com. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
  9. ↑ "(Press release) Haivision and Wowza Form SRT Alliance to Support New Open Source Low Latency Video Streaming Initiative".
  10. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine Editors’ Pick
  11. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine Editors’ Pick
  12. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine US Readers’ Choice (Best Server)
  13. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine US Readers’ Choice (Best Server; Best Streaming Innovation)
  14. ↑ Press Release TV Technology Europe Magazine STAR Award
  15. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine European Readers’ Choice Awards (Best Server; Best Innovation)
  16. ↑ Press Release WFX New Product Award (Best Overall New Media Product; Best Podcasting, Webcasting, and Website Streaming Media Solution)
  17. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine European Readers’ Choice Awards (Best Server; Best Streaming Innovation)
  18. ↑ Press Release European Readers' Choice Award (BestServer Software and Best Transcoding Solution)
  19. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine’s All-StarTeam named Wowza Co-Founder and CTO Charlie Good
  20. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media European Readers’ Choice Award (Server Hardware/Software)
  21. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media Magazine Readers’ Choice Award (Media Server)
  22. ↑ Press Release Streaming Media European Readers’ Choice Award (Best Streaming Innovation)
  23. ↑ "The 2008 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2008-09-25. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  24. 1 2 "The Envelope Please: The 2009 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Award Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2009-11-18. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  25. ↑ Schumacher-Rasmussen, Eric (15 October 2010). "The 2010 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Award Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  26. ↑ Schumacher-Rasmussen, Eric (24 October 2011). "2011 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  27. ↑ Schumacher-Rasmussen, Eric (16 October 2012). "The 2012 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Award Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  28. ↑ Dreier, Troy (18 June 2013). "The 2013 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Award Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  29. ↑ "The 2013 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2013-11-20. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  30. ↑ Schumacher-Rasmussen, Eric (24 June 2014). "2014 Streaming Media European Readers' Choice Awards Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  31. ↑ "The 2014 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2014-11-19. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  32. ↑ "The 2015 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2015-11-18. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  33. ↑ "The 2016 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2016-11-02. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  34. ↑ Schumacher-Rasmussen, Eric (15 November 2016). "2016 Streaming Media Europe Readers' Choice Winners". Streaming Media Europe Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  35. ↑ "The 2017 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2017-11-03. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  36. ↑ "The winners of the RedShark News awards at IBC 2017 announced". RedShark News. 19 September 2017. p. 2. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  37. ↑ "The 2018 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Award Winners". Streaming Media Magazine. 2018-11-14. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  38. ↑ "The List of the 50 Companies That Matter Most in Online Video in 2019". Streaming Media Magazine. 2019-08-09. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  39. ↑ "EY Announces Finalists for the Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2019 Award in the Mountain Desert region". www.ey.com. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  40. ↑ "Wowza Media Systems Wins the 2019 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award for the Media Industry" (Press release). 6 April 2020.

41.- Wowza Streaming Engine vs. Alternatives: Unveiling the Ideal Media Server Solution www.wowzaservers.com. Retrieved 2023-05-31.

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