Wowza Streaming Engine FAQ

Wowza Streaming Engine Manager enables you to easily configure, manage, and monitor Wowza Streaming Engine server software from a web browser on your computer, tablet, or phone. Although programmatic and command-line configuration and management of Wowza Streaming Engine is still available, the browser-based manager offers key benefits that enable publishers with a diverse range of technical abilities to have greater control and confidence when streaming video. Learn more about Wowza Streaming Engine Manager.

Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.5 contains several fixes and enhancements that help to improve the functionality of the media server software. Learn more.

The server can be administered with any Java Management Extension–compatible administration console, such as JConsole (available with the Java JDK) or the open source MC4J JMX browser, free of charge. Wowza Streaming Engine can also be administered from HP OpenView, Tivoli, IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic, SNMP and many other management platforms.

Wowza Streaming Engine runs on any platform that supports Java 9 (OpenJDK Java SE JRE 9.0.4) or later. Installer packages are available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. For best performance, we recommend using a 64-bit OS.

At a minimum, we recommend a quad-core system with at least 8 GB of RAM. To get the most throughput out of Wowza Streaming Engine software we suggest you use RAID 0 or RAID 10 configurations with two or more disks in the array for on-demand streaming. Depending upon your application and load, you may need more or less horsepower. Learn More.

Operation of Wowza Transcoder requires 64-bit Windows or Linux. This includes the use of Intel Media SDK, or NVIDIA CUDA and NVIDIA NVENC SDK acceleration technologies. Learn more about Wowza Transcoder.

You can utilize industry-standard development tools to accomplish the server-side programming tasks. Wowza offers the free Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE), which greatly simplifies and streamlines the tasks of extending, configuring, and managing the Wowza Media Systems products. The download information for this free development tool can be found on our Wowza IDE page.

Our extensible Java API provides a wide variety of system-integration options. Integration options include web services, JNI (Java Native Interface), direct Java integration, XML, remote procedure calls, and others. Learn more about Wowza Streaming Engine Java API.

Yes. Server-side programming is in Java. Wowza Streaming Engine offers an extensive API to give you maximum flexibility. For more information please refer to the Wowza Streaming Engine API Overview page or the Wowza Streaming Engine Rest API page.

Wowza is committed to supporting our developer community and offers a variety of tools and resources, including a developer license for use in building products and applications on the Wowza platform. Learn more about resources for Wowza developers.

Wowza Streaming Engine supports a wide range of media encoders that use RTMP, RTSP/RTP, MPEG-TS, SRT and WebRTC protocols. Encoders can be either unicast or multicast. Learn more information about how to use a variety of encoders and cameras as live sources for Wowza Streaming Engine.

Wowza Streaming Engine supports a wide variety of protocols and codecs. See the complete list of supported protocols, containers and formats. 

Yes. Wowza Streaming Engine supports restreaming of MP3 and AAC SHOUTcast/Icecast streams to all supported player technologies. Learn how to use SHOUTcast/Icecast with Wowza Streaming Engine. 

No. The core Wowza Streaming Engine software offers native capability for repackaging (i.e., transmultiplexing) H.264 content from one incoming transport protocol type (for example, RTMP) to a different outgoing transport protocol (for example, HLS). You need to use the transcoding feature only if you need to convert a non-H.264 incoming stream to H.264 streams, and/or change the bitrate or encoding profile of the incoming stream. Learn more about Wowza Transcoder.

Yes, there is support for load-balancing between multiple Wowza Streaming Engine instances. Wowza Streaming Engine also includes a very scalable HTTP-based caching mechanism for multiple-server delivery for on-demand streaming. For more information, please visit the Load Balancing Overview page.

Wowza Streaming Engine instances are easy to configure in an origin-edge architecture to deliver live media content across multiple servers. This functionality is built in and will require an additional license for each Wowza Streaming Engine instance. Learn more about scaling with Wowza Streaming Engine.

Yes, the Load Test Tool can simulate connections for load testing on Wowza Streaming Engine 4.5 and later. This tool enables you to configure, control, and monitor load tests through a web-based interface.

A lot of Wowza Streaming Engine software performance is driven by the I/O performance of the underlying server. Wowza Streaming Engine software can go only as fast as the server can deliver content bits from the disk. To get the most throughput out of Wowza Streaming Engine, we suggest you use RAID 0 or RAID 10 configurations with as many disks as possible in the RAID array. In addition, utilization of Media Cache improves performance by caching on-demand content.

Our customers have been able to get up to 10 Gbps of streaming performance for both live and on-demand media on multithreaded, multi-CPU machines that were finely tuned at the kernel level. On standard servers with dual quad-core processors and multiple NICs, up to 5 Gbps of streaming performance can be achieved if the server is properly tuned. Tuning guidance is available in our Performance Tuning Guide.

Yes. Wowza Streaming Engine is a highly scalable, tightly coded, multithreaded Java server. The software effectively utilizes CPU (unlimited cores/threads per instance) and memory resources to let you get more connection capacity out of any given hardware. The connection capacity in most cases is limited by the disk I/O or network interface performance.

Free AddOns, such as StreamLock, Load Balancing, and GeoIP Locking, are available with Wowza Streaming Engine software. Learn more about Wowza Streaming Engine AddOns.

Wowza Streaming Engine customers on older versions (4.1.1 or earlier) or Wowza Streaming Engine customers on older pricing plans, please visit our Wowza Streaming Engine upgrades page to learn more about advancing to the latest edition of Wowza Streaming Engine and receive unlimited use of Wowza Transcoder, Wowza DRM, and Wowza nDVR.

Wowza Streaming Engine supports Apple HLS for iPhone/iPad and other compatible devices; MPEG-DASH for DASH-AVC/264-compatible players; Silverlight Smooth Streaming; RTSP/RTP for Android, QuickTime, and other 3GPP mobile devices; MPEG-TS for set-top boxes; and Adobe HDS and several variants of RTMP for applications using Flash Player (versions 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11). See specifications for a current list of supported protocols.

Wowza Streaming Engine supports all common third-party players used both in-browser and as native applications on devices. Visit the Players and Playback page to learn more about configuring Wowza Streaming Engine with various players and devices. 

Wowza Streaming Engine supports streaming to all leading connected device platforms, from computers to mobile phones and tablets, gaming consoles and IPTV/OTT devices, smart TVs, CDNs, Facebook and more. Learn more.