Wowza Media Server - Excellent Flash Streaming Alternative!
Dec 14,2009
I recently launched a video site (yes, yet another video site in the world) that required a flash media server to record video from webcams. The concept is simple: Record 6 second interviews/answers to questions asked by people around the world.
I had two awesome experiences during this web dev experience .. Learning Flex, and working with Wowza Media Server. Both of which are a breath of fresh air in terms of code/deployment 
Wowza offers its media server in two flavors .. Self hosted or licensed through Amazon EC2. I'm already a gigantic fan of Amazon's S3 (I'm practically a tech evangelist for S3!), so naturally EC2 should be awesome, right?
Well ... IT IS AWESOME! EC2 awesomeness is a whole other post, though ...
Getting started with Wowza Media Server Pro on EC2 is simple. First you sign up with their Amazon link. Then you launch an instance of the Wowza Media Server machine image in the EC2 panel. Done. The server is up and running!
Granted, you need to setup the proper application on the Media Server to be able to record vid, but that's a simple xml document. On top of that, if you suddenly need another media server ... you just LAUNCH iT! EC2 is beyond awesome.
The site I used the Wowza Media Server on is: GrokFlok - Check it out and let me know what you think
Teft
5 Responses for "Wowza Media Server - Excellent Flash Streaming Alternative!"
Forgot to mention ... The major benefit of using EC2 and Wowza is that you have NO software install time. It's up and running (including an entire server at your command) in about 10 minutes. Wowza'z!
Teft,
While you make EC2 sound interesting, I've always used streamguys to run my wowza server for me... rather than setting up and configuring a server, I just email them and they do it for me.
Streaming Flash Server
How do you think using EC2 compare to having someone else do it? Will I have to muck with the server?
Hi Greg,
Thanks for the comment .. EC2 is really streamlined. You have a panel that allows you to launch/terminate servers and you can select 'machine images' of different computer/OS setups. After you 'launch' an image, it's fully up and running with in 5 - 10 minutes. No config required at all.
All of the EC2/Wowza images are in Fedora, which I'm not that familiar with, but I didn't have to do anything to get the server up, connected, and wowza running. It does it all automatically.
With that said, if you need customization of the Wowza applications then you still need to be able to edit the xml files of wowza and configure it. So I'm not sure if you or StreamGuys does that for you.
StreamGuys dedicated solutions are more expensive than the EC2/wowza combo, but if they are configuring your Wowza applications to a fine degree for you then that might be worth the extra $200 a month for the dedicated server.
EC2 with Wowza is costing about $105 a month right now for a dedicated server. AND they have an option to stream through Amazon S3 storage. Which means you can have unlimited servers connecting to the same S3 storage bins serving content. Scalable speed.
For my needs I only needed to record some webcam videos and then process those clips in a PHP daemon to send to S3 storage. Which turned out to be a matter of copying a vidrecord example xml doc and then changing the 'saved videos' folder.
Hope that helps,
Teft
Hi Teft,
Very interesting! So in fact, that you got me interested to try and setup the EC2/Wowza myself. I've set up Wowza dev version on my Windows PC and used it to successfully stream live video to a couple of PCs in the company. But we're looking to do a bigger project, with live streaming of an outside event and we would either need services of someone like Streamguys or do it ourselves with Wowza/EC2. How hard do you think would it be for me, a Windows guy with some basic knowledge of Wowza, to replicate what I've done and set-up a Wowza server for live streaming? Do you know of a tutorial or instructions for something like this?
Goran
Hey Goran, hmmmm, I'm not sure what it would take to support the hardware yourself... I'm only using Wowza on an EC2 server.
But, if you go the EC2 route, I think you'll find it relatively easy because it's setup already once you launch the EC2 instance. And, if you're just streaming some content then you're pretty much already setup with a base install off of EC2 and a Wowza image.
Best place for tutorials is right off of Wowza's website and forums. The community is pretty good and the Wowza people respond pretty fast (usually within 24 hours).
Hope that helps!
Teft
Leave a reply