Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 Release Notes

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™  4.8.24+4 build 20230704103639 released July 5, 2023.

Java support: Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 is built on Java 11 (OpenJDK Java SE JRE 11.0.2) but can be used with Java versions 11 - 12. For more information, see Manually install and troubleshoot Java on Wowza Streaming Engine.

New features and functionality in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24

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 4.8.24 contains enhancements and fixes that improve the functionality of the media server software.

New Google Analytics 4 Java module

Google is deprecating the Universal Analytics property on July 1, 2023. After that date, new data will only flow into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties. We updated our Google Analytics Java module to account for these GA4 changes. For more, see Send connection and stream statistics to Google Analytics with a Wowza Streaming Engine Java module.

Improved AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding

The Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 release contains several additions and improvements to the AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 transcoding workflow. These changes include the following:

• Added video codec profile-level propagation for U30 transcoding. Previously, a high profile was always written to the output stream. With this enhancement, the profile level for the U30 encoder is automatically set depending on output settings, such as bitrate, resolution, and codec. You can also configure the profile level from the transcoder template. See Configure AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding.
• Updated the U30 scaler to ensure width and height values are always divisible by four when fit-height and fit-width modes are used.
• Updated AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding to work with all AMD Xilinx Video SDK-supported operating system distributions and kernels, including:
  • Amazon Linux 2 (Kernel 4.14 and 5.10)
  • Ubuntu 22.04 (Kernel 5.15)

Note: This distribution requires a manual adjustment to the startup.sh script. Add option -f to line 17, replacing . /opt/xilinx/xcdr/setup.sh with . /opt/xilinx/xcdr/setup.sh -f.

• Ubuntu 20.04.3 (Kernel 5.11)
• Ubuntu 20.04.1 (Kernel 5.4)
• Ubuntu 20.04.0 (Kernel 5.4)
• Ubuntu 18.04.5 (Kernel 5.4)

Installation and update considerations for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24

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If you're updating to Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 from a base installation of Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.17 or earlier, see Updating to Wowza Streaming Engine version 4.8.18 or later.

When using the Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 installer to install a new instance of Wowza Streaming Engine on Windows, you may need to install additional dependencies to ingest SRT MediaCaster streams or use the generic SRT stream targets destination to publish an SRT stream. For more information, see our Ingest and publish an SRT stream guide.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install or update Wowza Streaming Engine, see the following articles:

• Install – Install and configure Wowza Streaming Engine
• Update – Update your Wowza Streaming Engine installation

Breaking changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24

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Java versions

Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.18 (or later) is compiled using Java 11 (OpenJDK Java SE JRE 11.0.2) and supports Java versions 11 - 12. Earlier versions of Java aren't supported. 

Important notes about changing the Java version:

• Wowza Streaming Engine versions before 4.8.18 were compiled using Java 9. If you're updating an earlier installation of Wowza Streaming Engine to version 4.8.18 (or later), you must install OpenJDK Java SE JRE 11.0.2 before running the Wowza Streaming Engine updater. For your convenience, we've provided the OpenJDK Java SE JRE 11.0.2 files as a zip on the Downloads tab of your Wowza account.
• If your Wowza Streaming Engine workflow uses custom modules or plugins, we recommend testing them with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.18 (or later) in a non-production environment before updating your media server software. The following Java modules are included:
  • java.base
  • java.datatransfer
  • java.desktop
  • java.instrument
  • java.logging
  • java.management
  • java.management.rmi
  • java.naming
  • java.prefs
  • java.rmi
  • java.scripting
  • java.scripting.jgss
  • java.security.sasl
  • java.sql
  • java.transaction.xa
  • java.xml
  • jdk.crypto.cryptoki
  • jdk.crypto.ec
  • jdk.httpserver
  • jdk.management
  • jdk.management.agent
  • jdk.naming.rmi
  • jdk.unsupported
  • jdk.xml.dom
• If you have other dependencies, you must install a Java 11 JRE or JDK that includes all your dependencies.

For more information, see Manually install and troubleshoot Java on Wowza Streaming Engine.

Detailed list of changes in Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24

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Changes since Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.23

• Added video codec profile-level propagation for U30 transcoding.
• Updated the U30 scaler to ensure width and height are always divisible by four when fit-height and fit-width modes are used.
• Updated AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding to work with all AMD Xilinx Video SDK-supported operating system distributions and kernels.
• Added a new Google Analytics 4 Java module to prepare for Google's deprecation of the Universal Analytics property on July 1, 2023.
• Fixed a DRM key rotation issue causing DASH manifests to be out of compliance.
• Fixed an issue introduced with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.21+6 that caused SRT streams to be unavailable when sent on some Windows machines.
• Fixed an error in the U30 transcoder workflow that occurred after resetting the decoder while processing a large number of streams.
• Fixed an issue where recording a stream larger than 4GB in append mode caused corrupted recordings.

Changes outside Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24 Release

As previously communicated, we have now replaced the older IP addresses for Wowza CDN on Fastly stream targets. You should remove any of these old IP addresses from your firewall rules:

• 34.81.115.95
• 34.159.18.6
• 35.198.130.93
• 35.202.71.195
• 35.238.167.42
• 130.211.240.176

These are the new IP addresses that we expect to remain static moving forward.

• 129.153.100.158
• 129.153.114.13
• 129.154.207.194
• 132.145.253.238
• 138.3.255.30
• 141.147.1.186
• 146.56.156.1
• 158.101.43.210
• 193.123.241.42

To learn more, see Send a stream from Wowza Streaming Engine to a Wowza CDN HLS target using Wowza REST APIs and Stream to Wowza CDN from Wowza Streaming Engine.

Known issues with Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.24

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For a detailed list of currently known issues, see Known issues with Wowza Streaming Engine.