Important: A newer version of Wowza Streaming Engine is available. For more information, see Latest software updates for Wowza Streaming Engine.
Version: Wowza Streaming Engine™ 4.8.14+9 build 20210719152831 released on July 20, 2021.
Java support: Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 is built on Java 9 (OpenJDK Java SE JRE 9.0.4), but can be used with Java versions 9-12. For more information, see Manually install and troubleshoot Java on Wowza Streaming Engine.
Note: For step-by-step instructions on how to update your Wowza Streaming Engine media server software, see Update your Wowza Streaming Engine installation.
Contents
New features and functionality in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Installation and upgrade considerations for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Breaking changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Detailed list of changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Known issues with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Patch updates to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
New features and functionality in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Wowza Streaming Engine is a robust, customizable, and scalable media server software that powers reliable streaming of high-quality video and audio to any device, anywhere. Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 contains several enhancements and fixes that help to improve the functionality of the media server software.
Upgrade to CUDA 11
With Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14, we've upgraded CUDA support to CUDA 11 for NVIDIA GPU-accelerated live stream transcoding. This upgrade supports using the latest NVIDIA drivers for transcoding at greater scale and speed. The NVIDIA microarchitecture of your hardware must support CUDA 11, and using NVIDIA driver version 460.00 or later is required.
With this upgrade, using Kepler GPUs and CUDA decoding are not supported. For NVIDIA accelerated decoding, use the NVCUVID (also known as NVDEC) implementation instead. For more information about NVIDIA hardware acceleration, see the following the article:
Beamr replacement of MainConcept for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 transcoding
This release sunsets support for MainConcept H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video transcoding and updates the Default encoding and decoding implementations for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video to Beamr. Beamr is a state-of-the-art encoder and decoder for high quality video and efficient transcoding. If you update to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 from an earlier version, existing Transcoder templates that use the Default encoding or decoding implementation for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video will automatically start using Beamr. For more information about using Beamr, see the following the article:
Installation and update considerations for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Important: If your workflow requires using graphic overlays and NVIDIA CUDA scaling on Windows, installing or updating to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 is not recommended due to a known issue with this functionality. We plan to address this issue in a future release.
Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.5 and later installs a custom packaged version of OpenJDK Java SE JRE 9.0.4 that includes the java.scripting module. This module is required for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 but is not added by the Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 updater. If you are updating to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 from a base installation of Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.0 or earlier, before you update, you need to install a supported version of Java that contains the java.scripting module, such as Java 9-12 or the custom version of OpenJDK Java SE JRE 9.0.4 installed with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 (available from the Downloads tab of My Account). Then instruct Wowza Streaming Engine to use that version of Java according to the instructions in Manually install and troubleshoot Java on Wowza Streaming Engine.
When using the Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 installer to install a new instance of Wowza Streaming Engine on Windows, you may need to install additional dependencies in order to ingest SRT MediaCaster streams or use the generic SRT stream targets destination to publish an SRT stream. To address this, install the latest version of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio appropriate to your operating system.
Breaking changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
With the sunset of MainConcept encoding and decoding for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video, some common advanced MainConcept parameters are automatically mapped to Beamr equivalents, with values also automatically adjusted as needed. However, advanced MainConcept parameters for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video that are not automatically mapped will not continue to work with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14. Access logs (wowzastreamingengine_access.log) report these parameters with a warning. For example:
WARN 200 - TranscoderNativeParameterInfo.mapEncodingParameter: MainConcept encoding parameter [mainconcept.entropy_coding_mode=1] not supported by Beamr4 and won't be applied
If your configuration includes advanced MainConcept encoding parameters that are not automatically mapped, you need to update your encoding configuration for Beamr (decoding parameters for Beamr are not available). See Use advanced Beamr configuration parameters for information about identifying advanced Beamr parameters for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video encoding.
Detailed list of changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Changes since Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.13
- Upgraded CUDA support to CUDA 11. For NVIDIA hardware acceleration, the NVIDIA microarchitecture of your hardware must support CUDA 11, and using NVIDIA driver version 460.00 or later is required.
- Sunset support for Kepler GPUs. See the Deprecated and Dropped Features section in the CUDA 11.0.3 Release Notes for more information.
- Sunset support for CUDA decoding. For NVIDIA accelerated decoding, use the NVCUVID (also known as NVDEC) implementation instead.
- Sunset support for MainConcept H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video encoding and decoding.
- Updated the Default encoding and decoding implementation for H.264 and HEVC/H.265 video to use Beamr instead of MainConcept. Existing Transcoder templates that use Default as the encoding or decoding implementation will use Beamr after updating.
- Mapped the following advanced MainConcept encoding parameters to Beamr equivalents for H.264, with values automatically adjusted as needed.
- mainconcept.bit_rate > beamr4.kbps
- mainconcept.bit_rate_mode > beamr4.rc_type
- mainconcept.idr_interval > beamr4.keyframes
- mainconcept.level_id > beamr4.level_idc
- mainconcept.max_bit_rate > beamr4.max_kbps
- mainconcept.num_reference_frames > beamr4.max_refs
- mainconcept.reordering_delay > beamr4.bframes
- mainconcept.write_au_delimiters > beamr4.aud
- Fixed an issue with the beamr4.kbps and beamr4.max_kbps parameters not working.
- Fixed an issue in which the Beamr encoder was not producing B-frames when configured to do so.
- Fixed a CSRF security vulnerability in which delete calls from Wowza Streaming Engine Manager could also be called from third-party web pages if the user is logged into Wowza Streaming Engine Manager.
- Fixed an issue in which HLS rendition reports (EXT-X-RENDITION-REPORT) were absent when a player stopped for more than 30 seconds and then restarted.
- Fixed an issue in which HLS rendition reports (EXT-X-RENDITION-REPORT) contained invalid URIs.
- Fixed an issue in which the process of converting nDVR stores to files using the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API did not complete.
- Fixed an issue in which RTSP playback connections using TCP could erroneously log a warning stating "RTCPHandlerSource SSRC doesn't match RR".
- Fixed an issue in which authenticated users requesting nonexistent virtual hosts could exhaust file system resources.
Known issues with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 includes the following new known issues:
- Overlay image issues with NVIDIA CUDA scaling on Windows
- Access logs report warnings for missing Transcoder libraries on Windows after update to 4.8.14
- Decrease in NVIDIA GPU performance
For a detailed list of known issues that are still in effect, see Known issues with Wowza Streaming Engine.
Patch updates to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14
Between production releases, Wowza occasionally provides patches to fix bugs or regressions in the latest production release, which can be deployed in production environments and workflows for long-term stability.
There is no available patch release for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14 at this time.
