Fastest streaming output – The best feature of wowza servers is fastest streaming output than others. You will get the fastest output of the streaming. You get any videos and audios in ultra-high quality with fast streaming. Therefore, the time taken for the buffering is lowered down. If you are the premium user having lots of data space on the server, you will get the fastest speeds of streaming.

• Multi-platform support – Onea prominent feature of this web server is the multi-platform support. This means that the web server is accessible from almost every device having internet connectivity. You can see, there are lots of devices that are being used by people now days. There are devices other than computers having internet connectivity. The platforms of devices differ from each other. There are many platforms such as Android, Symbian, Palm OS and other proprietary platforms. The difference between these platforms is not only the basis of firmware, but there are different types of formats that are supported by the devices. Therefore, it is essential that the web servers must make their websites accessible from the devices. Wowza servers are present for almost every device having internet connectivity. This is the one biggest feature of the wowza hosting. There are darned few other web servers that offer this facility. You can get the exclusive media contents from the server wherever you go. This way, the wowza hosting, is ideal for the publications on various platforms.

• The use of the high quality encoders – The feature that makes this web server different from the others is the use of the high quality video encoders. This way, you get finest video and audio quality. There are various media formats that are supported by the web server. The main video extensions that are supported by the server are FLV, MOV, MP4 and M4V. The use of h.264 stream is available which offer the best experience for videos. The use of multi-bitrate (MBR) is done for audio files. The VOD or video on demand feature is also immensely powerful that adds more stars to the overall web server ratings than others.

Hosting Marketers has started offering on all its hosting plans including hybrid servers wowza hosting. Wowza has the advantage of red5 that it can stream to Apple devices, iphones and iPads.

Stream Types

In Wowza Media Server 3, MediaStreams represent an incoming or outgoing stream of video, audio or metadata. Wowza Server provides a mechanism for defining custom server-side MediaStream implementations or stream types. These stream types are configured using the Streams/StreamType property in the Application.xml file. The following table lists the more commonly used stream types and their intended use (for a complete list, consult the User’s Guide):

• default: Video on demand streaming of static Flash media, H.264/AAC and MP3 content
• record: Video recording
• live: Publish and play live video content (best for one-to-many streaming of live events)
• live-lowlatency: Publish and play live video content (best for one-to-one or one-to-few video/audio chat applications)
• live-record: Same as live plus content will be recorded
• shoutcast: Audio re-streaming of a SHOUTcast/Icecast MP3 or AAC+ audio stream
• shoutcast-record: Same as shoutcast plus content will be recorded
• liverepeater-origin: Origin stream type used by live stream repeater to deliver a single streaming using origin/edge configuration
• liverepeater-edge: Edge stream type used by live stream repeater to deliver a single stream using origin/edge configuration
• rtp-live: Re-streaming of an RTSP/RTP, native RTP or MPEG-TS stream
• rtp-live-record: Same as rtp-live plus content will be recorded

Supported Media

Wowza Media Server 3 supports the following media file formats: FLV (Flash Video), MP4 (QuickTime container) and MP3 content (see table below for common file extensions). To play video on demand content, the proper prefix must be prepended to the file name to create a stream name. For example to play the MP4 file mycoolvideo.mov use the stream name mp4:mycoolvideo.mov. The following table lists the more common file type prefixes (for a complete list consult the User’s Guide):

• flv: FLV (Flash Video – this is the default media type so the qualifier and the file extension can be omitted)

  Example: “flv:mycoolvideo.flv”

• mp4: MP4 (QuickTime container – .mp4, .f4v, .mov, .m4v, .mp4a, .3gp, and .3g2)

  Example: “mp4:mycoolvideo.mov”

• mp3: MP3 (.mp3)

  Example: “mp3:mycoolsong.mp3″

• smil: SMIL (XML files used to configure multi-bitrate streams – .smil)

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