Playback of HLS stream from WSE keeps aborting when delivered through Wowza CDN

Wowza Video (Formerly Streaming Cloud)
1

Hi!
We currently use a Wowza Streaming Engine installation for streaming VOD and live content as adaptive bitrate HLS streams.
We usually need to deliver the content to a few hundred viewers but sometimes there are use cases where we need to serve our live content to a few thousand viewers and our WSE instance is not capable of delivering to that many users at once. That is why we wanted to use our WSE only for transcoding of the stream and then deliver the HLS rendition via a Fastly Stream Target in Wowza Video. We followed the instructions and while in general it is working, the playback is a nightmare. It keeps stalling or aborting completely after a few seconds of playback and all of the players we tested were not able to play the streams smoothly for longer than 5 seconds before stopping. Accessing the HLS stream directly from the WSE works perfectly fine.
Why is this? What can we do to avoid this problem?

Details about our WSE instance:

  • AWS EC2 instance
  • Instance type: g4dn.xlarge
  • Wowza Streaming Engine version 4.8.20+1

Our live application on the WSE has a Transcoder enabled. This Transcoder generates the following outputs:

  • 360p
    • Height: 360 pixels
    • Video Bitrate: 500 kbps
  • 480p
    • Height: 480 pixels
    • Video Bitrate: 1000 kbps
  • 720p
    • Height: 720 pixels
    • Video Bitrate: 2000 kbps

All outputs share these options:

  • Fit Mode: fit-height
  • Width: 1280 pixels
  • Video Codec: H.264
  • Profile: Main
  • Key Frame Interval: Insert a key frame every 25 frames
  • Fit Mode: fit-height
  • Audio Codec: AAC
  • Audio Bitrate: 192 kbps

All 3 of these outputs are part of a Stream Name Group “${SourceStreamName}_all”.

The Fastly Stream Target in Wowza Video has the Custom Origin option enabled and points to the public address of our WSE instance.

The playback URL than looks like this:
https://cdn3.wowza.com/5/[fastly-id]/[application-name]/ngrp:[stream-name]_all/playlist.m3u8

Can the problem be caused by the fact, that we try to stream a Stream Group through Wowza CDN? If so, what would be the right way to restream the transcoded renditions from our WSE instance over the Wowza CDN?

Thanks for your time and help.

2

I think you have a wrong Wowza Streaming Engine configuration for the application. You must use an HTTPOrigin application. If you dont you will get playback issues like you describe.

3

That was indeed the problem. Thanks for your help.