February 28, 2008

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Wowza Media Server Installation on a Mac

For the first tutorial, we’re going to get our hands dirty with the Wowza Media Server Pro10 by installing the example video recording application on a Mac. If you caught the introduction to the Wowza Media Server you know you’re going to a few things for the tutorials, but for this one you only need the Wowza Media Server Pro10 developer license and your web cam. For your reference, make sure you grab the Wowza Media Server Pro User Guide.

Fortunately, Wowza has made installation super easy and have even provided an array of example applications to get you started. To install the server, just download the Mac OS disk image file, double click on the set up file, and run through the instructions!

Now let’s get the server up and running. We’re going to startup in standalone mode rather than service mode.

Running the server standalone is best for developing Wowza Media Server Pro custom applications since the server can be started and stopped quickly and server log messages can be seen immediately in the console window. Running the server as a system service is most often used for server deployment where there server needs to continue to run even after you log off the machine.

Starting up in standalone mode is done with the following commands in Terminal:

cd /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/bin
./startup.sh

If this is your first time starting the server up, it should ask you for your serial number that was emailed to you when you “bought” your free developer license.

Alright, so we have our server running, now the fun begins!

1. Navigate to /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/examples/VideoRecording and run the install.command file.
2. This will install the example video record application in /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/applications.
3. Now open up /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/examplesVideoRecording/client/videorecording.html in your browser and you’re ready to go!

Click record and stop when you desire. Then watch it play! If you don’t see the camera view, right-click on the record button and select settings and choose your webcam under the camera icon.

Also of note is that the file you just recorded was saved to /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/content as videorecording.flv. You can edit this location in the /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/conf/Application.xml file. (see page 21 in the user guide)

That’s it! Pretty simple right? This will provide the basis for installation on EC2 in the next tutorial where we’ll get into a little more detail.