This article describes known issues and limitations in Wowza Video. If available, workarounds for these issues are described. Check back often as this article will be updated as new developments occur.
Known issues
The following are known issues in Wowza Video:
General
- Recording real-time streams — The recording fails if your real-time stream name has either a forward (/) or backward (\) slash.
User Interface
- General UI
- Logo position on the video preview — The video preview only displays the logo in the bottom right. If you choose another position, it will reflect correctly on the hosted page, but not on the video preview. This is only applicable if your player type is Wowza Flowplayer.
- Starting and stopping streams as a trial user — Trial users might see incorrect messaging when they start and stop live streams or transcoders. The messaging includes incorrect statements about paid account status and transcoding hours. If you're still within the 30-day trial window, you can ignore these messages. If you've upgraded to a paid account and are no longer a trial user, you should create a new stream rather than use streams you created during your trial.
- Stream target status — On the Outputs & Targets page of a running transcoder, the status check mark for a stream target is not always accurately displayed. Using the Action button to update the status of a stream target can also cause errors in the status display. To see the accurate status of your streams, navigate away from the Outputs & Targets page. When you return, the status displays correctly.
- Custom stream targets — Creating a new custom stream target by copying an existing stream can result in a 500:Internal Server Error. To avoid this issue, don't use copy and paste to create new custom stream targets.
- Real-Time Streams token expiration date — On the Real-Time Streams page, if you edit the token expiration date on a stream that has security enabled, then Save it, when you edit the stream again, the previous expiration date displays. To ensure the new date displays, edit the stream, disable security, then Save it. Next, re-edit the same stream, enable security, add a new expiration date, then Save.
- Outputs & Targets tab for transcoders — Clicking Add a Preset Output in the Add Output pull-down results in a spinning gear icon. This isn't intended to be a selectable option. To clear the spinning gear icon, refresh the page. You can then select a standard output option from the list.
- Live Stream Authentication — When editing the Video Source and Transcoder properties on a live stream with authentication enabled, selecting the Disable authentication on the video source checkbox under Source Security causes the Source Security options to disappear. The workaround for this is to click Cancel and select Edit again.
- Analytics
- Unique Viewers — On the Historic Analytics page, data may appear shifted as the analytics page displays data in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
- Bandwidth in GB — On the Historic Analytics page, data may appear shifted as the analytics page displays data in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
- Filter button — The Filter button on the Live Analytics and Historic Analytics pages appears to not update the information. However, the information in the charts and tables is filtered automatically when you select new values.
- Help button — The help button for the Live Analytics and Historic Analytics pages doesn't launch a page-specific help topic.
- Asset Management
- Video preview — After uploading and publishing an asset, the video preview cannot be played and there is no play triangle on the thumbnail. To re-enable the video preview, refresh the browser page.
- Edit assets — When editing asset properties, clicking Discard Changes appears to clear your edits. However, if you click Edit again during the same session, the changes reappear. Refresh the page to completely clear your edits.
- Publishing and unpublishing assets — Toggling quickly between published and unpublished states might result in a player error in the generated hosted page or embed code. You can fix that error by refreshing the page the player is on.
- Original HTML 5 Player
- Countdown clock — The countdown clock displays the countdown time using the device's time, rather than the time zone specified during setup.
- Account Usage
- Bandwidth — When viewing stream targets on the Bandwidth tab of the Account Usage page, some streams may not appear in all Time Period selections.
API
- Assets Endpoints
- Access token usage — Making API calls to /assets endpoints with a system access token, rather than a personal access token, results in a 401:Feature Not Enabled Error. A short-term solution is to use a personal access token. However, when this issue is fixed, make sure any integrations in production are updated to use the system access token. System access tokens are better suited to applications in production.
- Filtering assets — Filtering on GET /assets does not work in the same way as other endpoints. GET /assets supports a ?query= construct that allows you to search for assets by name, tag, or description. You can sort or paginate results using the following fields: sort_column, sort_direction, page, per_page.
An example search query using the /assets endpoint where "jeep" is the name of the assets(s) being queried:
https://api.video.wowza.com/api/v1.8/assets?query=jeep&sort_column=created_at&sort_direction=desc&per_page=15&page=1
- Live Data — The following usage endpoints might report inaccurate unique_viewer live data when the same viewer looks at both the live stream and the VOD asset for a stream: This single same viewer will show as one unique viewer across both live data sets, instead of showing as a different unique viewer for each type. Both live stream and VOD asset viewer data currently comes from the stream target, which doesn't differentiate between VOD and live streams for unique viewers.
- /usage/stream_targets/{id}/live
- /usage/vod_streams/{id}/live
- /usage/accounts/live
- Usage Endpoint — When requesting VOD usage from the Usage endpoint api/Usage/vod_streams/vod_streams_id the returned egress_seconds value is twice what is expected.
Help content
- Trial tutorial: Integrate with the REST API — If you use Chrome or Firefox to complete the Integrate with REST API tutorial in a trial account, you'll notice the content on the Token Management page loads slowly with up to 10 seconds of delay. This is a browser limitation. Safari loads the content quickly.
Limitations
The following are limitations in Wowza Video.
Home page charts and tables
For customers with large data sets, the charts and tables on the home page could take a while to load.
Browser support
You can sign in to Wowza Video by using any modern web browser that supports HTML5 and Cascading Style Sheets level 3 (CSS 3). The Wowza Video web user interface has been most extensively tested on Google Chrome, however, so for best results we recommend that you use the latest version of Google Chrome.
Important: If you use Safari, you'll need to disable the Prevent cross-site tracking browser setting so our dynamic help content, including trial onboarding tutorials, can be displayed.
Data and metrics
The following limitations apply to historical data and metrics:
- Viewer data isn't available for streams before October 5, 2015.
- Health metrics for streams that started before June 6, 2017, may be incomplete or missing.
