Red5 vs Wowza
Although both red5 and Wowza Streaming Engine are media servers there are a number of differences between, first of all wowza is more expensive then red5…. red5 is free and wowza costs $55 a month to use it on a server.
Wowza is more stable, we run servers with red5 and servers with wowza, red5 has to be restarted once or twice a month, wowza we never had to restart it because it stuck.
But while red5 can run on a virtual server with 4 giga of RAM and still manage to broadcast to 100 viewers or host a video chat site, wowza needs a dedicated server and some good RAM. So I would say that wowza is more resource hungry than red5.
Red5 is very badly documented. At the very least you need a good understanding of Java and networking to make sense of it.
Red5 is developed by volunteers, as such there is no support other than people helping each other in a mailing list. You need patience and the skills to help fix your own problem. (Don’t worry we are here to help!)
Below is a table with some comparison between red5 and wowza media servers:
Feature | Wowza Streaming Engine 4 | Red5 |
| Protocols supported | RTMP RTMPT RTMPS RTMPE RTMPTE | RTMP RTMPT RTMPS RTMPE RTMPTE |
| Developer edition | 10 Connections (Free) | Free |
| Pricing | $995 (30 day Trial also available) Daily License (5$) Monthly License (55$) | Free(Open Source) |
| Supported Platforms | Windows Mac OS X Linux Solaris Unix 64-bit Support on all IPv6 Support | Windows Debian/Ubuntu Mac OSX WAR Gentoo Linux |
| Audio / Video Streaming (live and on-demand) | FLV H.264 FLV MP3 AAC, LC-AAC, HE-AAC Speex | (On Demmand) FLV MP3 F4V MP4 AAC M4A (Live) Sorenson VP6 h.264 Nelly Moser MP3 Speex AAC NSV |
| Multi Client/ Multi Protocol Streaming | Flash (RTMP) iPhone/iPad (HTTP Streaming) Silverlight (Smooth Streaming) QucikTime/3GPP (RTSP/RTP) IPTV (MPEG-TS) | Flash (RTMP) |
| Recording | H.264/AAC to FLV container H.264/AAC to MP4 (Quicktime) container | FLV Only |
| Inbound Live Encoder Support | RTMP (Flash & H.264/AAC) RTSP / RTP / MPEG-TS (H.264/AAC: unicast, multicast, TCP, UDP) ICY (MP3/AAC: SHOUTcast/ icecast) | |
| Action Method Format 3 (AMF3) | AMF3(Bi-directional ) | AMF3 |
| Server Side | Java | Java |
If you find some thing missing or incorrect info on this table, then just feel free to send me message using this form.