Wowza Video offers two workflows for creating and executing your streaming solution, the live stream and transcoder workflow. Before you build your solution through Wowza Video or the Wowza Video REST API, you'll need to choose the workflow that best meets your business and streaming needs.
Live stream workflow
The quickest way to your first broadcast is with a live stream. The live stream workflow uses hls-https to send multibitrate or single bitrate streams to Wowza Video. When you use the live stream workflow, Wowza Video generates the best output renditions available based on the device you are using and the aspect ratio for your stream. It automatically creates the streaming infrastructure you need to process and publish the live stream to a global audience, including:
- A transcoder
- Output renditions
- A Wowza CDN on Fastly stream target
- A hosted viewing page
This workflow is suitable for most users and is available through the user interface and through the REST API.
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Transcoder workflow
The transcoder workflow allows you to manually configure output renditions and associated stream targets to fit your specific streaming solution. You'll create each piece of the streaming infrastructure mentioned in the live stream workflow and control configuration aspects such as:
- which audio and video codec is used
- what the bitrate is
- what the keyframe intervals are for each output rendition
The transcoder workflow also provides additional options to:
- configure buffer size
- idle timeout
- maximum number of connections
This workflow is the best choice for streams that do not use hls-https protocol and is available through the user interface and through the REST API. This workflow does not provide a hosted viewing page.
