2023-04-03 19:51:00
The main news of the release is the addition of support for the specialized AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 video card for H.264 and H.265 transcoding. It looks like using Wowza with Xilinx will allow you to create extremely productive transcoding systems and will be a good alternative to using Nvidia GPUs. But for now this is just a preview, for the full use of this method Wowza Streaming Engine will be ready in the next releases.
More interesting news, in our opinion, is the complete abandonment of the Beamr libraries for software transcoding and the transition to the MainConcept library... “The move to MainConcept delivers improved quality, speed, and performance. ” - said in the message Wowza.
In confirmation of the fact that the new is the well-forgotten old, we can recall the history of previous releases. The Beamr software transcoder replaced the built-in MainConcept library no later than July 2021 with the release of Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.14. "State of art Bemr transcoding technology was introduced for improved video quality with similar CPU usage" was said then.
It's hard to say what caused the return to the MainConcept transcoding library. Transcoder from Beamr showed good results. But perhaps the reverse replacement happened because Beamr required detailed customization, which is less suitable for a universal product with a wide range of supported user scenarios.