Announcing Streaming Engine 4.8.10

Community
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We’re happy to announce that Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.10 is now available. We’ve released a new feature and improvements to help make your streams successful.

What’s new:

  • Timed metadata for MPEG-DASH live streams: Timed metadata is the key to adding interactivity to live and VOD streams. Previously only compatible with HLS, Wowza Streaming Engine has expanded its support for timed metadata to include the MPEG-DASH protocol. Now, when using MPEG-DASH, timed metadata will create a timecode that accompanies the piece of data about the stream. When the stream is encoded, the timed metadata is synchronized to audio and video keyframes. Timed metadata allows for subtitles, overlaying texts or images at a specific moment, injecting advertisements, telemetry, and more.

What’s improved:

  • Improvements to Apple HLS : The most common compression method used by servers and browsers to compress and decompress content as it’s transmitted over the internet is Gzip. We made updates to HLS that include changing the default behavior for HLS streams so that they return Gzip encoded content when clients accept it​. This boosts both playback performance and reliability.
    • More specifically, Gzip helps speed up the stream’s ability to reload the media playlist and switch between renditions. Wowza Streaming Engine has supported Gzip since it was first required by the HLS specification, but this change makes it easier to use and provides greater compliance.



FULL LIST FOR 4.8.10

Changes since Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.9

  • Added support for converting AMF timed metadata to Event Message (emsg) timed metadata for MPEG-DASH live streams.

    • Added a new property to configure whether emsgs are added to a stream’s audio or video segments (location: [ install-dir ]/conf/[ application-name ]/Application.xml, //; name: mpegdashDataEventsTrackType; type: String; default: audio).

  • Updated the default behavior for HLS streams to return Gzip encoded content when clients accept it.

    • Added a new property that determines whether to return Gzip encoded content when players accept Gzip encoded content (location: [ install-dir ]/conf/[ application-name ]/Application.xml, //; name: cupertinoUseGzipEncoding; type: Boolean; default: true).
    • Deprecated the following properties:
      • cupertinoForceGZIPPlaylists
      • dvrCupertinoPlaylistUseGzip
      • dvrCupertinoPlaylistGzipThreshold

  • Fixed an issue with incorrect audio frame counts with HLS live streams.

  • Fixed an issue with not reading the language in VTT files that caused the default language (English) to be specified in the master playlist for VOD streams.

  • Fixed an issue with not specifying language names in the native language for subtitles in HLS master playlists.

  • Fixed a Null Pointer Exception that occurred when requesting a nonexistent segment with HLS VOD streams.

  • Fixed an issue with onUnPublish events being called twice for HLS and SRT MediaCaster streams.

  • Fixed an issue with MediaCaster for HLS stream notifications in which onStreamStart would be called prior to the start of streaming, resulting in a mediaCaster.getStream() call from within the onStreamStart() method returning null.

  • Fixed an issue with logging file not found exception warnings when using Media Cache with VOD captions enabled and playing a VOD file that does not include captions.

  • Fixed an issue with MPEG-DASH playback of MP4s that do not contain NAL PPS parameters.

  • Fixed an issue with RTCP NACK messages not being correctly rate-limited with WebRTC streams.

  • Fixed an issue with the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API returning a 404 error instead of a response when requesting an unloaded application.

  • Fixed an issue with the Stream Targets page in Wowza Streaming Engine Manager showing an incorrect status (Waiting) for Active streams.

  • Read the full list of changes since the last release here.

Download 4.8.10

To get started, download the updater from the “My Downloads” tab after you log into your Wowza Account, or download the installer from the Downloads page.