support for live http for amazon Cloudfront

[etechship]

+1 I have a number of (~20) clients that I support and it would be great to get them all on 1 server and put the load on cloudfront for the live streaming.

[dptekco]

+1 . Charlie, please consider making this high priority.

FMS on Cloudfront has a ton of prohibited use restrictions, not to mention many of us choose Wowza for various other reasons.

We need the option to deploy Wowza live streams on Cloudfront asap.

Thanks for your consideration and good work as always.

[charlie]

At this time we are focused on getting Wowza Media Server 3 done. Our plan is to revisit this when this work is done.

Charlie

[george_v]

At this time we are focused on getting Wowza Media Server 3 done. Our plan is to revisit this when this work is done.

Charlie

Hello, I just thought I'd inquire about the status of functionality where Wowza can act as live streaming origin for CloudFront. Is that anywhere near completion? We are deciding on our streaming infrastructure now, and definitely want to go with CloudFront, but would prefer to use Wowza over FMS.

Thanks,
George

[rrlanham]

George,

Status is same, it is possible future feature, but focus is still on Wowza 3

Richard

[ckarpovich]

Hi All--
Any updates or plans to revisit the idea of using Wowza as an origin server for CloudFront?
Craig--

[rrlanham]

Craig,

There is no news. It is still a possibility but not imminent as far as I know and no time frame.

Richard

[david_bennett]

I think the main issue is that Wowza requires a session to maintain state and dynamically produce segments.

CloudFront ignores query strings (which Wowza uses for the session variable) and assumes the origin is stateless.

The reason FMS works is that it's using an Apache module to split the stream into segments that are then saved and served up as regular files. Totally stateless.

I had some minor success with putting Nginx in front of Wowza and having it rewrite urls to add the session query string.

[oliverholmberg]

Hey All,

Obviously, it's agreed that Wowza as an origin to a Cloudfront distribution would be great. As a few posters mentioned, http streaming over Cloudfront with a Wowza origin should be technically possible, and in fact it is. Recently, Amazon announced the ability to use FMS instances as an origin for Cloudfront, so I got to thinking, this MUST be possible. I was able to achieve it in the following way:

Streaming H.264 MP3 content from Flash Media Encoder ->
Standard EC2 Wowza Instance (sm) with standard live application ->
An http (download) Cloudfront distribution with a custom origin set to the public dns of for mentioned Wowza instance->

I tested the playback with Adobe Flash Playback (http://www.osmf.org/configurator/fmp/), which has a specific setting for http streaming I don't believe jwplayer will do dynamic http streaming, but flowplayer will as i understand it. I connected the player to the stream with the following url scheme:

http://[wowza-address]/[application]/[application-instance]/[stream-name]/manifest.f4m

Here's the caveats I've found:

1. Cupertino http streaming to iOS does not appear to work. Tested on iPad1.
(It tries to load the stream, but never is able to. I'm able to confirm from logs that the Cupertino stream is indeed being requested.)

2. Playback was mostly consistent on Flash Player, however I did experience a few instances of the player "buffering" and never resuming the content. Refreshing the player always resumed the stream.

My guess is that FMS and Wowza do have slightly different methods of packaging and serving http playlists, but not that different. As one poster mentioned, using Apache or Ngix to serve playlist files may offer a solution. Furthermore, I'd imagine there are a number of other Wowza settings that may affect the way in which http content is served, and offer potential solutions. I hope this re-lights the flame of working on this functionality.

-Oliver

[smarthosting]

Hi folks,

Has there been any more movement on this regarding CloudFront?

Thanks very much.