Send an RTMP Stream to Wowza Streaming Engine With OBS Studio
Wowza Streaming Engine™ is a flexible media server software that allows you to use your own encoder to integrate live video streaming into your app or service. Using a free encoder software that supports the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), you can add live streaming into any workflow.
In this video, we’ll show you how to use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio, a free and open-source streaming and recording solution, as the source for an RTMP-based live video stream to Wowza Streaming Engine.
To learn more about live video streaming with your RTMP encoder and Wowza Streaming Engine, see our technical documentation.
Full Video Transcript:
Justin Miller:
RTMP is the de facto protocol used to live stream to most media servers whereas Apple HLS or MPEG-DASH is used for playback by the viewer. Let’s look at this process using Wowza Streaming Engine as the media server software and OBS as the encoder. We’ll use VLC Player for playback since we’ll be running locally on Windows without a public IP address.
To begin, open Wowza Streaming Engine Manager in your browser and under Applications, we’ll start with Add Application. Make the type Live, name it appropriately, and Add it in. We’re streaming to the player using MPEG-DASH or Apple HLS so uncheck the other playback options and Save the change. Since we’re only streaming locally, we’ll also go to Source Security and Edit the settings so RTMP sources are set to open.
Now with these changes saved, we can go ahead and Restart the application for all of our changes to now take effect. Under Sources (Live) we can see the application connection settings that we’ll be needing in order to use them for OBS Studio. We’ll format the information like this.
Now, if you’re using OBS for the first time, you may not have a source set up and you can just choose to add our sample file as a Media Source. This can be found in your Wowza Streaming Engine installation under the Content directory. Once it’s been added, you’ll need to stretch it to fit the screen size.
Now we can go under Settings and select Stream. Here we’ll choose the custom service. Enter in the key connection settings as discussed and name the stream under the Stream Key. I’m making mine as simple as possible. Once the settings are applied, you can save them and Start Streaming. Back in Wowza Streaming Engine under Incoming Streams, we can see the stream is running and by selecting it will get more details.
To view this, we’ll go under Test Playback. Now we’ve made playback options available using Apple HLS or MPEG-DASH. So copy the one you want to use and then go into VLC Player and use the URL to play back the stream. That’s it for going from RTMP to Apple HLS or MPEG-DASH. Thanks for watching and happy streaming.