Wowza Community

Tuning for low latency

Hello,

I am encoding with libx264 a capture process and broadcasting mpegts stream on udp. Using crtmpserver, I was able to get the stream out on JW Player with about 2 seconds of latency. But the stability is not great, so we are going to try Wowza and see if it can improve things. I have setup the example called ‘live’ on Wowza 3, but the delay is quite a bit longer, about 4 seconds, and seems to accumulate to 5 or 6 seconds after the stream has been playing for a while. I have seen on the forums other users mentioning they were able to get 200 ms latency, we would love to have that good performance! Are there some instructions on how we can tune the live example for lower latency?

Thanks,

Wim

Wim,

Take a look at :

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-set-up-low-latency-applications-in-wowza-streaming-engine-for-rtmp-streaming

Richard

Please zip up and send [install-dir]/conf and logs directories to support@wowza.com referencing this thread for further troubleshooting. Also provide encoder setting details.

You should try a lower complexity stream (baseline or main profile with no b-frames), low key frame and high frame rate. We have seen latency down to half a second.

-Lisa

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. I have now followed the instructions in your link, as well as in the “general performance tuning” guide with all those Java VM settings. I am using sun Java. But am still finding crtmpserver is giving me significantly lower latency for the rtmp streaming, for exactly the same input (mpegts broadcast on localhost udp). Additionally, the rtsp stream is not real-time at all, it is a few seconds behind Wowza’s rtmp stream for some reason. I am playing the rtsp stream with vlc and rtsp_caching set < 100 ms, and I’m playing the rtmp streams with JWPlayer.

Wowza is seeming to be much more robust than crtmpserver, which is why I’d like to keep trying to get Wowza working faster. Are there any other things I can try to get the latency < 1 second, or at least on par with crtmpserver?