Wowza Community

How can I add the VODs3 application to an existing EC2 Windows Instance?

I’ve installed WSE4.7 on an instance of Windows2012 with EC2. I do NOT want to install the prepackaged ones when creating and instance - we HAVE to have it installed on Windows.

We tried the pre-packaged ones to test, and the VODs3 application was there, but now that we’ve created the production instance on Windows, that S3 Application is not there. I’ve googled and found a lot of disconnected discussions, but no clear (or current) documentation as to how this can be accomplished.

We’re still learning how Wowza/AWS works, so could you be clear about the steps? All the product names on AWS, mixed in with technical terms and dependencies for Wowza has made it very confusing about what has to be done, much less where to begin (VODS3, S3FS, Caches, etc.). It’s been frustrating to see answers like “Have you looked at…” - I’ve looked at them all, and few if any talk in terms of Windows, or what has to have been done to get to the point being discussed.

I’m frazzled, so my apologies if my question implies a “tone”…I’m just confused and don’t know how to put these pieces together. I very much appreciate any help.

This question was answered in our ticketing system, however I will provide a full answer here.

Wowza Streaming Engine includes the vods3 module.

S3 buckets must be added as a Media Cache source. Please go into Wowza Streaming Engine Manager / Server / Media Cache / Sources. Once on that page select “Add Media Cache Source” then select “AmazonS3” as the “Source Type.” I have included a screen capture of my Wowza Streaming Engine Manager showing exactly where to set that up.

More information on how to get everything properly configured can be found in the following article:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-use-amazon-s3-with-wowza-media-server

The high level view of what Media Cache does is allow you to access content that is not located on your local file system. You can pull content via HTTP (Apache, nginx, IIS, etc…), UNC paths, and from cloud based locations like Amazon’s S3 buckets, Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. Because the content is remote it needs to be cached locally for faster playback, hence media cache. The initial playback of the content will be slow as the content has to be pulled over to Wowza Streaming Engine for delivery.

I hope that helps to demystify what the purpose of Media Cache is and how it can be used as a remote storage location for VOD content.