How to Install Wowza Streaming Engine and Run Your First Live Video Stream

Justin Miller:

Hi, I’m Justin Miller from Wowza Media Systems and I’m going to show you how to install and configure Wowza Streaming Engine as your media server software in order to broadcast your first live stream.

For this, we’ll also be using OBS Studio as the encoder and VLC media player in order to locally play back that live stream. To get started, you’re going to need a license key, so go to wowza.com and under Products, choose Wowza Streaming Engine.

From here, you can Try It Now in order to get a trial license or scroll all the way down to our different pricing plan options in order to get a subscription. In either case, you’re going to be emailed your license key, so go ahead and go to your email and copy that license key and then back at wowza.com, at the top you’ll see an option to Download the installer.

Make sure you download the right installer for whatever operating system you’re on. I happen to be on Mac, so I’m going to open up that installer and then we can begin the installation process.

Once the installer initializes, we can begin going through each screen and entering the proper information. I’ll first start by going in and clicking Next, accepting the license agreement, clicking Next again, pasting in the license key, clicking Next. Here I’m going to enter in an administrator account, so I’ll put in my username and password that I want for that account. Then I’ll click on Next, agree to allow Wowza Streaming Engine to start automatically.

Click Next again and the installation process begins. For this broadcast, what we’ll be doing is using OBS Studio to send an RTMP stream to Wowza Streaming Engine, which will in turn transmux that stream into other protocols which we can then view using VLC media player.

Once the installation’s complete, it’s going to open the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager in a default browser, such as, in this case, Safari. If you need to access Wowza Streaming Engine Manager, you can just go to localhost — or whatever your IP address is — :8088.

As you can see it at the top there, it’s localhost:8088/enginemanager, but you can actually just put in localhost:8088. I’m going to sign in using my administrator account I just created. Now we see Wowza Streaming Engine is running.

While we have status information right here, we can actually test using the video on demand sample. Just click on Test Players and you can use MPEG-DASH as the protocol in order to test. That usually works on most operating systems through the browser by default, but and since we’re on a Mac, we can also use Apple HLS in order to test.

If you want to test something beyond this such as an Adobe RTMP, or HDS, or Microsoft Smooth, you’ll probably need to install the correct plugins. I’m going to close this now and we can begin creating the live stream by going to Applications here at the top and adding an application.

You can either add an application by clicking one of the options here or using the default live that’s already been created. I’m going to instead add an application. I’ll use the single server origin and I’m going to name it Arvada.

So, I’ll add it here and as you can see on the left side it’s been created. All I really need now in order to set up OBS is Sources (Live) which indicates on the right side the host server, host port, and application name.

You’ll also need a way to have source authentication as security and if you haven’t already created that, you’ll need to go under Server and under Source Authentication, Add Source.

I’m going to call this Denver, maybe I’ll actually create that as the password as well. Click Add and now we have a source authentication for RTMP-based stream. I’m going to go back to applications. As you can see I’m just using the dropdown menu and going straight to Arvada. Again, all I’m trying to get here is the application connection settings under Source (Live).

I’m going to be using these in just a second. I’m just going to copy that right there. I usually remember that the host port is 1935 and again the application is Arvada. Now we can go over to OBS Studio, and if you’ve just installed it for the first time, you will have to add a source. I’m going to add video capture device and use my webcam. Hello everybody. Just for fun, I’m also going to right-click and because I have a green screen background already, I’m going to chroma key that out.

As long as I’ve gone that far, I might as well also add an image behind me, which means once you’ve chosen the image that you want, you’re going to want to put it behind the video capture device.

Alright, that looks like a good video to live stream for the first time. Let’s click on settings and we’ll go over to Stream and for service we’ll choose Custom. If you recall, I had stated earlier that this is an RTMP stream from OBS Studio, so now we’ll paste in that IP address, :1935/Arvada.

Stream key can be anything I want just as long as it’s one word. I’m going to call it brick and then I’m going to Use Authentication and put in the source authentication that we set up before. Now that I’m done, I will click Start Streaming and if it’s working, you’ll see at the bottom live stream along with changes to CPU usage or dropped frames.

Everything seems to be operational, so now I’m going to go back to my Wowza Streaming Engine Manager and verify things under Incoming Streams. There’s brick, if I click on brick, I can then go to Test Players and check it using the MPEG-DASH protocol.

Naturally, it’s not working. I’m going to do a refresh and now I’m going to click on Test Player, go to MPEG-DASH and try that again. All right. Sometimes you get a few errors like that. I’m also going to click on Apple HLS just tested here. That’s also working correctly.

The last thing I’m going to do is test it in VLC player. To test it in VLC player, I actually need the URL I’m going to test, so for example, I could go in and copy the MPEG-DASH one open up VLC player and under open network in file paste that in. There I am. Seems to be working. If I want to try another one such as Apple HLS, I can also choose to do that.

Generally, Apple HLS tends to be what is used by other embeddable players out there. Here we go. One more thing I’ll also mention to you guys, you may want to go and test it in a system, say like using THEOplayer, which is a good embeddable player out there. However, if you test it in this system, it may not work.

The reason why it won’t work when testing it on a server out there in the world is because you are running it locally probably without a static IP address and so you’ll end up not being able to test this way, which is why I definitely recommend looking at it through VLC player or testing it through the Test Player within Wowza Streaming Engine.

All right guys. I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. My name is Justin Miller and you all have a great day.