Understanding Live Streaming using Wowza Streaming Engine

Introduction

With growing footprints of multinational enterprises in almost every part of the globe, the need to connect different wings of an organization has become one of the primary concerns of administrative authorities. This demand for communication of mission values is key to preserving the company's vision and taking the business forward in alignment with its core values.

VIDIZMO allows organizations to record their content, be it for global product launches or internal communication, process it to be accessible to millions of devices and distant geographical locations, and to reach their targeted audience within a few seconds of scheduling a live webcast. All of this comes bundled with secure access rights to protect your live content and great interactivity options to engage your viewers anytime anywhere.

Why choose Wowza Streaming Engine

If you wish to deploy your media streaming servers on-premises and integrate it with your existing storage and processing servers, using VIDIZMO with Wowza Streaming Engine for your live streaming needs seems to be the right solution. With its powerful Adaptive Bitrate streaming capabilities, Wowza Streaming Engine proves to be 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 the 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 VIDIZMO portal.

Cost

Wowza Streaming Engine's stand-alone server has built-in procesing powers that can be used for transcoding. This in turn helps save additional cost of deploying hardware servers for 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 an 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 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

Now, in order to connect your Wowza Streaming Engine server with VIDIZMO, perform the steps below.

1. Wowza Streaming Engine ECDN Node

Here, you need to follow the steps in this article to configure a Wowza Streaming Engine ECDN node using the Base Playback URL, REST API URL, Username, Password and Recording Root Path obtained above.

2. Publishing Point using ECDN Node

Here, you need to follow the steps in this article to set up a Publishing Point using Wowza Streaming Engine Server with details of how you would like to stream your live session. This includes the name of your stream, the qualities you would like to have your live session rendered in, transcoder configuration, list of IP addresses you would want to block for publishing/viewing access, and much more. This gives you a greater control over how you want to publish and deliver your stream to end-viewers.

Test Stream and Go Live

Now is the time to reap the fruit of all your efforts. After creating your publishing point, you can activate your publishing point and preview your stream using our player.

Now, you are ready to go live by scheduling a live webcast and starting your broadcast session.

Record and Publish Stream

VIDIZMO gives you the ability to directly record your live stream from play back page, using Start Recorder option:

Eventually, when you stop the session, you will be asked for more options regarding your recorded session. Read more about these options here: Save and Publish Session.

Retrieve Stream from Wowza

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

However, VIDIZMO automates the process for you by In order to obtain your recording, you will have to access the network path you entered above as Recording Root Path.

You will see a list of files (as many times as you started and stopped recording) in your storage from where you may play it back or preserve for future use. The videos are named in chronological order starting from the name of the stream LiveOdysseyProductLaunch, and then being enumerated from 0 onwards.

Read Next

• Understanding Live Streaming in VIDIZMO
• Understanding Live Streaming using Wowza Streaming Cloud