Trouble with Low Latency with the Wowza CDN

[Jacob_Gonzalez]

I am testing low latency streaming with Wowza Streaming Engine and the video player hls.js. I have used the following guide for setting up a Wowza application and I successfully streamed with about 5 seconds of latency using time.gov as a reference.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/deliver-apple-low-latency-hls-live-streams-using-wowza-streaming-engine

With the same setup I created a Stream Target to push to the Wowza CDN (not the Wowza Cloud) but it won’t play and the Stream Target says there was an error.

My understanding is that this CMAF delivery method should be compatible with normal HLS and DASH but in some cases won’t have the low latency. Is there a configuration change I need to do to get it to work with the CDN or is low latency not supported at the moment?

[video_streaming]

From Wowza Streaming Engine’s side, configuring the application as an HTTP caching origin will remove any session information from the playlists/chunks, thus making it cacheable by 3rd parties such as CDN’s. If you have confirmed that the LL-HLS media delivered by Wowza doesn’t contain any session information (ie: chunklist.m3u8 instead of chunklist_sessionID.m3u8).

Our current CDN configuration supports pulling LL-HLS and not pushing a stream. From Wowza’s end, everything comes down to removing the session information in the stream, so it’s cacheable.

Scale LL-HLS with a CDN

Optionally, with your own CDN account, you can scale LL-HLS delivery by connecting a Wowza Streaming Engine Live HTTP Origin application to a CDN edge that can pull streams from the Wowza Streaming Engine origin application, such as the Fastly CDN.

To connect the Live HTTP Origin application to your CDN, provide the IP address or hostname of the Wowza Streaming Engine origin server in your CDN configuration. Also in your CDN configuration, enable connecting to the origin server over SSL/TLS using the port you configured for SSL/TLS in the Wowza Streaming Engine origin (default port 443).

See Configure Wowza Streaming Engine as an HTTP caching origin for information about HTTP origin applications.

[Jacob_Gonzalez]

Thank you. I set up another application with Live HTTP Origin and was able to use Stream Targets to push to the Wowza CDN. It worked and had 15 seconds of latency.

You mentioned having the CDN pull from the Wowza application. I will look into that.