Wowza Streaming Engine is a robust, customizable, and scalable media server software that powers reliable streaming of high-quality video and audio to any device, anywhere. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.22 contains enhancements and fixes that improve the functionality of the media server software.
Support for AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 in preview mode
With Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.22, you can transcode Wowza Streaming Engine with an AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 accelerator card in a preview mode in addition to using the CPU, NVIDIA cards, or Intel QuickSync Video.
This enhancement allows users to seamlessly leverage the hardware-accelerated features of Xilinx video codec units, enabling high-density real-time transcoding for live-streaming video. For more information, see the following articles:
- Introduction to AMD Xilinx Acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine
- Server specifications for AMD Xilinx acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine transcoding
- Configure an AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding for Wowza Streaming Engine
- Limitations of AMD Xilinx acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine transcoding
MainConcept replacement of Beamr for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 transcoding
This release sunsets support for Beamr H.264 and HEVC/H.265 transcoding and updates the default encoding and decoding implementations for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video to MainConcept. The move to MainConcept delivers improved quality, speed, and performance.
If you update to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.22 from an earlier version, existing Transcoder templates that use Default as the encoding or decoding implementation will use MainConcept after the upgrade. You will need to update your encoding configuration for MainConcept if it uses any advanced Beamr parameters. For migration details and parameter mappings, see Migrate from Beamr to MainConcept in Wowza Streaming Engine.
Upgrade to CUDA 12
With Wowza Streaming Engine release 4.8.22, we've upgraded support to CUDA 12 for NVIDIA GPU-accelerated live stream transcoding.
This upgrade supports using the latest NVIDIA drivers for transcoding at greater scale and speed. The NVIDIA microarchitecture of your hardware must support CUDA 12. NVIDIA driver versions must be at least 525.60.13 for Linux and 527.41 for Windows. Any previous or unsupported drivers will cause Wowza Streaming Engine to revert back to default CPU transcoding. For more information, see Server specifications for NVIDIA acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine transcoding.
