Wowza Community

How to stream WOWZA with OBS?

Hi, i want to achieve the next :

  1. stream from OBS to WOWZA

  2. stream the video&sound as HLS to the end user

  3. reduce the latency to minimum as possible

We have a few articles specifically for addressing lower latency using Apple’s HLS. They can be found at the link below:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-improve-playback-of-lower-latency-apple-hls-streams

https://www.wowza.com/blog/hls-latency-sucks-but-heres-how-to-fix-it

There will always be some latency between the encoder and the live video. This is the nature of streaming media. A few things can help.

A) The protocol you choose for playback can add a fair amount of latency. RTSP playback and RTMP playback have much lower latency than segmented HTTP delivered content like Apple HLS, MPEG-DASH, Adobe HDS, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming. The reason for this is that the player will not play a segment until three entire segments are finished downloading to the client to help smooth out networking issues. Content is segmented into chunks based upon the keyframe distance and time specified in Wowza Streaming Engine. Apple strongly recommends six second segments, however that increases latency dramatically.

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2224/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40009745-CH1-MEDIASTREAMSEGMENTATION-USE_6_SECOND_TARGET_DURATIONS

B) Make sure that your keyframe distance, also known as a “Group of Pictures” or GOP, is two seconds and is consistent. As OBS uses the x264 implementation of the H.264 codec you can add the “no-scenecut” option. I have attached a screenshot of how to configure OBS to use the no-scenecut option to this response.

If keyframes are not in perfect cadence then chunk sizes will be random in duration and cause buffering and possibly connection timeouts.

I hope that this helps to address your latency concerns.