Im Not Playing Any More

I've read sooo many requests on how to do this, we ourselves have struggled to find one 'good' article that's simple to follow, so here's my contribution based on our own internal documentation and I hope that it's of use to someone.

We mostly found a need to stream to one of our existing Flash Media Interactive Servers and use Wowza servers for edge servers for larger streams, or as a quick way to fire up additional capacity in particular geographic locations.

What you need:

• One installed, working, configured and licensed copy of Adobes' Flash Media Interactive Server
• One installed, working copy of Wowza Media Server 2 (We use their EC2 instances available on Amazon Web Services for speed of deployment)

What we're trying to do.

The scenario is this. we're streaming a single stream to the live application on our FMIS (Flash Media Interactive Server), and we wish this to be used as an Origin server. We want people to watch from our Wowza Media Server 2 on the relay application. This is quite a common thing, letting you relay the stream to multiple servers to cope with demand as you need it.

[ Flash Encoder ]  ---->  [ FMIS ] -----> [ Wowza Media Server ] --> Client Video Player
                                Origin Server             Edge Server
                                

What I’ll not cover

• How to install ether of the servers
• How to manage directing your users to the correct server
• How to set up a player to watch the streams

There are plenty of good guides that already cover this in far more depth than I can go into!

Some things we should know.

• Our Wowza installed dir for this is in the folder

   /home/wowza/
  

• We want to relay a stream called
  

  mylivefeed 

• The Origin application is is called
  

  live

• The origin domain is
  

  fmis.mydomain.com

• Our edge application will be called
  

  relay

• Our edge server is called
  

  wowza-edge.mydomain.com

The Nitty-Gritty

1. Setting up an Edge Application
   1. If you’ve not already done so, edit the admin.password file in the folder
      /home/wowza/conf/admin.password
      1. i. Add a line at the bottom with a username and password that you’ll remember, and that is secure!
2. Create the folder for the application
   1. i. Add the folder /home/wowza/applications/relay/
3. Create the Configuration folder for the application. Do Not create this file in /home/wowza/applications/relay/! This is a very common mistake and it will have you pulling out your hair for days.... trust me!
   1. i. Add the folder /home/wowza/conf/relay/
   2. ii. Copy the Application.xml file from /home/wowza/conf/ into this new folder
   3. iii. Edit the newly copied Application.xml
   4. iv. Find the StreamType setting and change it from default to liverepeater-edge
      
      
   5. Setting up the Stream
      1. Create a file in /home/wowza/content/ folder called mylivefeed.stream. This file tells Wowza what we’re streaming and from where, so it’s important to get it right!
      2. Edit this file and add the single line defining where the stream is coming from, in this example:
         

         rtmp://fmis.mydmain.com:1935/live/mylivefeed

4. Now we have to tell Wowza that we want to use this file for our relay.
   
   1. Navigate to http://wowza-edge.mydomain.com:8086/streammanager/index.html
   2. Use the username and password you set up in 1.a.
   3. Click on Start Receiving Steam under relay/_definst_
   4. Select liverepeater option.
   5. Set the Stream Name to mylivefeed.stream

That's it! Now just set up your flash player as you would, and set

Server : rtmp://wowza-edge.mydomain.com:1935/relay
File or Stream Name : mylivefeed.stream

I hope this this is found useful by someone! Any questions please contact me and I'll see if I can help, or track me down on Twiiter: @scampiuk