Wowza Media Systems™ regularly releases Wowza Streaming Engine™ media server software builds with new features and functionality. You can install the software on your computer using an installer, or if you already have Wowza Streaming Engine installed, you can update it with a build updater.
Note: If you have problems with or want to provide feedback about our software updates, contact Wowza Technical Support. To learn about the variety of support resources that we offer to our user community, see our Support Resources webpage.
Latest production release
The latest Wowza Streaming Engine production build is Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.8 build 20191105123929 released on November 5, 2019.
For a complete list of changes in this build, see the Release Notes.
New features and functionality in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.8
Wowza Streaming Engine is robust, customizable, and scalable media server software that powers reliable streaming of high-quality video and audio to any device, anywhere. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.8 contains several fixes and enhancements that help to improve the functionality of the media server software.
Support for Low-Latency HLS
Wowza Streaming Engine can now produce Low-Latency HLS live streams. Low-Latency HLS streams conform to Apple’s preliminary protocol extension to the HLS spec.
Note: The Low-latency HLS live streams produced by Wowza Streaming Engine version 4.7.8 conform to the version of this Apple specification published on July 25, 2019. This implemention does not support skip tags or renditions reports.
Wowza Streaming Engine generates Low-Latency HLS streams using the CMAF packetizer, which, in addition to generating CMAF segments, also generates smaller units of content called chunks. These CMAF-compliant chunks double as partial segments for Low-Latency HLS streaming. As a result, you can use the CMAF packetizer to generate Low-Latency HLS streams that use the fMP4 container format and are delivered to players over HTTP/2.
For more information about Low-Latency HLS, see our technical article Deliver Apple Low-Latency HLS live streams using Wowza Streaming Engine.
You can also find information about both CMAF and Low-Latency HLS in the article Understanding protocols and formats supported by Wowza Streaming Engine.
Support for CMAF
Wowza Streaming Engine now also supports Common Media Application Format (CMAF), the open, extensible standard that enables efficient streaming using the HLS and MPEG-DASH protocols. Wowza Streaming Engine can deliver both single and adaptive bitrate HLS and MPEG-DASH live streams using the single new cmafstreamingpacketizer, which wraps stream segments in the fMP4 container format and delivers streams over HTTP/1.1. For more information about using CMAF in Wowza Streaming Engine, see any of these technical articles:
- About CMAF workflows in Wowza Streaming Engine
- Stream using CMAF with Wowza Streaming Engine
- Configure CMAF live streaming packetization in Wowza Streaming Engine
- Create adaptive bitrate CMAF streams using Wowza Streaming Engine
- Stream using a CMAF live stream repeater in Wowza Streaming Engine
- Deliver HLS live streams using CMAF and HEVC with Wowza Streaming Engine
Get the latest production release
- New Wowza Streaming Engine installation
Installers for this Wowza Streaming Engine build are available on our Downloads webpage and can be used to install a new Wowza Streaming Engine instance. - Update an existing Wowza Streaming Engine installation
To update a Wowza Streaming Engine installation, sign in to your Account Management page using your Wowza account and then check the My Downloads tab for the latest updater for your Wowza Streaming Engine version. You must have an active Maintenance and Support contract to receive updaters. For more information, see Wowza Streaming Engine Maintenance and Support.
Note: You must have an active Maintenance and Support contract to receive updaters.
Latest beta release
Between production software releases, Wowza produces beta builds so you can get the latest bug fixes and improvements for Wowza Streaming Engine and get early access to new features being developed. Although the improvements and enhancements have been tested by QA, full regression testing and performance testing hasn't been performed on beta builds. Support for beta builds is fully available, but there is no guarantee of hotfixes. Contact support if you want access to a beta build that includes these fixes and enhancements.
The latest Wowza Streaming Engine beta build is Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.0 build 20200131165942.
Changes since the latest production release
- Fixed an issue with restarting long-running source streams that could trigger a memory leak in the MPEG-DASH and CMAF live packetizers.
- Fixed an issue that caused uninitialized memory to be returned to users if a thumbnail was requested for an incomplete frame.
- Fixed a Java non-heap memory leak with the creation and destruction of the thumbnailer.
- Removed the Google protobuf library.
- Fixed several security vulnerabilities in Wowza Streaming Engine Manager.
- Restored HttpStreamerItem.getLiveStreamPacketizer() and HttpStreamerItem.getLiveStreamRepeater() in the Wowza Streaming Engine Java API. These were accidentally removed in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.8.
- Restored the leading forward slash in responses to Request.getRequestURI() in the Wowza Streaming Engine Java API. This was accidentally removed in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.7.8.
- Updated the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager Tomcat web.xml file to use the default HTTP Header Security Filter.
- Updated the XStream library to version 1.4.11.1.
- Fixed an issue with audio-only and video-only streams packaged into MPEG-TS files for HLS that resulted in improper segment duration values.
- Updated libvpx to version 1.8.1 on both Linux and Windows.
- li>Updated WebRTC session timeouts so clients won't disconnect as quickly when sources drop.
- Added IMediaStreamNameAliasProvider3 to resolve stream name aliases for WebRTC sessions. The following methods were added to support the use of stream name aliasing:
- String resolvePlayAlias(IApplicationInstance appInstance, String name, WebRTCSession webrtcSession)
- String resolveStreamAlias(IApplicationInstance appInstance, String name, WebRTCSession webrtcSession)
- String resolvePlayAlias(IApplicationInstance appInstance, String name, IWebSocketSession webSocket)
- String resolveStreamAlias(IApplicationInstance appInstance, String name, IWebSocketSession webSocket)
- Made the following updates to WebRTC logging, handling, and configuration:
- Added logging for UDP sessions.
- Added logging for UDP/TCP disconnects.
- Updated the timeout handler so that it correctly times out inactive sessions.
- Fixed an issue that prevented passing through codec updates for WebRTC connections in the system. Depending on your publishing clients source encoder, this could lead to frequent calls to IMediaStreamActionNotify3's onCodecInfoVideo method. To turn this off, you can use the webrtcCodecUpdates property (WebRTC/Properties Name: webrtcCodecUpdates Type: boolean default: true).
- Fixed issue where stream targets unnecessarily sent IGMP join when pushing out a stream. This caused PAT and PMT errors and caused extra network traffic.
- Fixed a null pointer exception that occurred when initializing SSL configurations for some stream targets.
- Fixed an issue where Push Publish session destroy was incorrectly calling session create notification.
- Improved the performance of underlying child stream target sessions by updating the ModulePushPublish to immediately start "parent" targets (GroupManager, WowzaCDN, WowzaStreamingCloud) on application start and stop the parent targets on application stop.
- Fixed the following issues with the stream target group manager:
- Improper handling of the playbackHost parameter for child profiles that require it, such as Akamai targets on the Akamai MSL4 network.
- Problems arising from using a calculated bitrate as part of the output streamName when "{bitrate}" is specified in the streamName parameter. Now the source stream name is used as the fallback.
- Failure to properly shut down the push sessions when stopping or restarting MediaCaster source streams that were the source of the transcoded streams being pushed.
- Fixed a transcoder issue with the sampling rate and channel number not being set for the Speex decoder.
- Fixed an issue with NVIDIA hardware-accelerated decoding that could result in the delivery of incorrect or corrupt frames downstream.
- Fixed issue with DVR recording with 48kHz audio and DASH playback that resulted in bad segment duration values in the DASH MPD.
- Fixed an issue with SRT streams using the Medicacaster where stream targets weren't notified correctly of the streams' change in status.
- Added support for Apple Low-Latency HLS EXT-X-SKIP tag and _HLS_skip query on playlist requests.
- Added support for the HLS media playlist EXT-X-RENDITION-REPORT tag. The tags are included for each ABR rendition in both standard HLS CMAF and low-latency HLS CMAF media playlists.
- Added support for Apple Low-Latency HLS segment HOLD-BACK attribute on EXT-X-SERVER-CONTROL tag.
- Added an application property to allow enabling and control of the segment HOLD-BACK value reported in Apple HLS CMAF media playlists (location: Application.xml:Aplication/HTTPStreamer/Properties, name: cupertinoSegmentHoldBack, type: Double, default: none)
- Added an application property to allow control of the PART-HOLD-BACK value reported in Apple Low-Latency HLS media playlists (location: Application.xml:Aplication/HTTPStreamer/Properties, name: cupertinoPartHoldBack, type: Double, default: 3x CMAF chunk duration)
