Wowza Video encoding supports most video formats and can handle them well, but, to optimize your video quality, there are technical recommendations you should follow.
Recommended container: MP4
We recommend using the MP4 container. MP4 video files using H.264 carry their metadata — duration, frame rate, etc. — in the moov atom.
If you receive processing errors during a video upload in Wowza Video, move the moov atom to the front of the file. Most desktop encoding programs will insert the moov atom at the end of a video file which is okay for playback of a local file on a desktop program. However, any kind of progressive download for online video may require the metadata to be available right away for immediate playback. A dedicated program like XMedia Recode or MOOV Relocator will move the moov atom to the beginning of the file.
Recommended video codec: H.264
- Progressive scan (no interlacing)
- High Profile
- 1080p source files: 10Mbps
- 720p source files: 7Mbps
- 480p source files: 4Mbps
Aspect ratio
Our default aspect ratio is 16:9, but we support other aspect ratios as well. These are the recommended video resolutions for 16:9 aspect ratio:
- 2160p: 3840x2160
- 1440p: 2560x1440
- 1080p: 1920x1080
- 720p: 1280x720
- 480p: 854x480
- 360p: 640x360
- 240p: 426x240
Recommended frame rates
We recommend you use one of the standard frame rates: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, or 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable).
Interlaced content should be deinterlaced before uploading. For example, 1080i60 content should be deinterlaced to 1080p30, going from 60 interlaced fields per second to 30 progressive frames per second.
Recommended audio codec: AAC-LC
- Channels: Stereo
- Sample rate: 96khz or 48khz
- Bitrate: 256kbps
Multiple audio tracks
We support multiple audio tracks in our encoding. To use this feature, your input file must contain all the audio tracks that you want presented in the player, and they should have valid language metadata.
Audio track language
To identify the language metadata for each audio track, we use the Language tag on the input audio tracks metadata. We accept tags using either ISO-639-1 or ISO-639-2 values.
The Language metadata value can be set with the ffmpeg parameter -metadata:s:1:0 language=eng.
Audio files
We support uploading audio files with either aac or mp3 codecs, however, we recommend that the input follow our recommended audio codec setup. For audio only files, we encode the content to one HLS and one MP4 file.
We do not support audio only files for DRM content.
