Wowza Streaming Engine: Exploring Live Streaming Workflows

Introduction

In today's globalized business landscape, multinational enterprises face the critical challenge of connecting their various branches and effectively communicating their mission values. To address this need for seamless communication and align the organization's vision, the use of live content delivery has become imperative.

VIDIZMO offers a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to record and process their content, making it accessible to a diverse range of devices and locations worldwide. With secure access controls and interactive features, VIDIZMO empowers businesses to engage their target audience through live webcasts and internal communications.

Why choose the Wowza Streaming Engine

For organizations seeking an on-premises media streaming solution that integrates seamlessly with their existing storage and processing servers, VIDIZMO, combined with Wowza Streaming Engine, is the ideal choice for your live streaming needs. With its powerful Adaptive Bitrate streaming capabilities, Wowza Streaming Engine proves to be a stand-alone media server handling all your requests and helping you deliver audio and video streams to a broad range of devices.

On-Premises Media Server

Wowza Streaming Engine is a robust on-premises media server built specifically to cater to the needs of organizations concerned with low-latency streaming and high data confidentiality.

Seamless VIDIZMO Integration

VIDIZMO has a seamless workflow integration with Wowza Streaming Engine, which gives you a hassle-free configuration to set up your streaming servers and go live! After you enter your Wowza Streaming Engine server URL and credentials to log into the web admin portal while creating an ECDN node, you just have to sit back and relax while VIDIZMO creates your node and helps you set up your streaming server directly using the VIDIZMO portal.

Cost Efficiency

Wowza Streaming Engine's stand-alone server has built-in processing powers that can be used for transcoding. This, in turn, helps save the additional cost of deploying hardware servers for the encoding process. By moving heavy resource-consuming tasks from input locations to offsite servers, there is no need to buy heavy hardware encoders.

Transcoding Performance

After a few product revisions, Wowza has improved its transcoding performance over the years to support playback on almost all devices, which is powered by VIDIZMO's robust HTML5 Player. Wowza is very flexible in accepting all major codecs with availability to readily proceed them into playable formats.

Wowza Configuration

1. Before you start, you need to whitelist VIDIZMO's IP Address that corresponds to the web application server on which your  VIDIZMO application is deployed to connect your streaming engine to a remote instance in the Server.xml file located at [install-dir]/conf/Server.xml.

2. Next, in order to connect your Wowza Streaming Engine server account with VIDIZMO, you need to provide some basic information that will be used by VIDIZMO for integrating with your account, as mentioned below:

i. Base Playback URL, which is the URL of your Wowza Streaming Engine server along with its listening port. To learn more about ports used by Wowza for streaming, see Wowza Streaming Ports.

ii. The REST API URL required to make API calls to your Wowza Streaming Engine. The format for the REST API URL is:

http://[yourWowzaServerBaseURL]:8087/v2/servers/[serverName]/vhosts/[vhostName]/

iii. The Username and Password that you use to sign into your Wowza Streaming Server account.

iv. A shared UNC Network path to store recordings of the live sessions if you wish to save the live webcast as a Recording Root Path.

Closed Captioning for Live Streams

You can enable closed captioning for Live streams by ingesting your caption data into the live stream, which is then converted to the appropriate format for streaming using Adobe HDS, RTMP, Apple HLS, etc.

Many OTT devices have already included the support of CEA-608 closed captioning data packaged in live streams. Other players only have the support to display AMF data.

This is a list of supported caption input/output formats for you to be able to view them as timed text overlay during your live webcast:

To learn more about how you can enable them in Wowza, see:   How to Configure Closed Captioning for Live Streams.

VIDIZMO Configuration

To establish the connection between your Wowza Streaming Engine server and VIDIZMO, follow the steps outlined below.

1. Configuring Wowza Streaming Engine ECDN Node

Refer to the provided article for detailed instructions on configuring a Wowza Streaming Engine ECDN node within VIDIZMO. During this process, use the following information obtained earlier: Base Playback URL, REST API URL, Username, Password, and Recording Path. These settings ensure seamless integration between Wowza Streaming Engine and VIDIZMO.

2. Setting Up a Publishing Point using ECDN Node

Consult the provided article for step-by-step instructions on setting up a Publishing Point using Wowza Streaming Engine Server. Customize the settings according to your requirements, including defining the stream name, desired qualities for live session rendering, transcoder configuration, and various limits. These limits encompass bandwidth inbound, the maximum number of playback connections, stream duration, IP addresses for publishing/viewing access control, and more. By configuring these parameters, you have finer control over how your stream is published and delivered to end-viewers.

Note: It is crucial to be mindful of the defined limitations to avoid buffering or interruptions during the live stream. Trial accounts come with default limitations that cannot be modified. The default limitations are as follows:

1. Maximum Playable Connections: 5
2. Stream Duration Limit: 900 seconds (15 minutes)
3. Bandwidth Inbound Limit: 500 KB/sec

Testing the Stream and Go Live 

At this stage, it's time to see the results of your hard work. Once you have created your publishing point, you can activate it and preview the stream using our player. This allows you to ensure the quality and content meet your expectations. Once everything is in order, you are ready to go live by scheduling a live webcast and initiating your broadcast session. 

Note: Before initiating the live webcast, it is advisable to conduct thorough testing and rehearsals to ensure a smooth and successful streaming experience. 

Recording and Publishing Stream

With VIDIZMO, you can conveniently record your live stream directly from the Live Control Room page. Simply utilize the "Start Recorder" option to initiate the recording process.

Once your live session concludes, VIDIZMO presents various post-session options to manage your recorded content. After stopping the session, you will be prompted to explore additional functionalities related to your recorded session. For detailed insights into these options and how to make the most of them, refer to the "Save and Publish Session." 

After successfully recording a session, you can easily access and play it back as Video On Demand (VOD) content. This recorded content can be found in the Media Manager under the "Published" tab. From there, you will be able to initiate playback of the recorded session, providing you with the flexibility and convenience to review the session at your convenience.

Note:  For general live-streaming scenarios, it's important to be aware that there is no recorded option available. When configuring Wowza as an ECDN node, the API Endpoint URL and server type are typically provided. However, when setting up the ECDN as "General," only the "Base Playback URL" is required. Due to this configuration, the recording option does not appear during live streaming using the General Server. It's essential to note that while recording is supported on Wowza and Wowza Cloud, it's not available in the General Server setup. Be mindful of this distinction when planning and executing your live-streaming events.

Retrieving Recorded Streams from Wowza

To learn more about how to record live sessions via your Wowza Streaming Engine account, read Record live streams in Wowza Streaming Engine. 

However, VIDIZMO simplifies this process by automating the recording for you. To access your recordings, access the network path you entered earlier as the Recording Path during the setup of Configuring Wowza Streaming Engine ECDN Node.

In your storage, you will find a list of files corresponding to the number of times you started and stopped recording. These files can be played back or preserved for future use. The videos are named in chronological order, starting with the name of the stream "LiveOdysseyProductLaunch," and then sequentially enumerated, starting from 0 onwards.