Create Video On Demand CDN Resource

Requirements to Provide VoD Services

To provide VoD CDN service to your clients, you need the following:

• Streaming edge servers (created on your own in Control Panel) or subscription for the streaming location from CDN federation. Assign these streaming location into the edge group of the billing plan used by your client. It is applicable to both VoD Pull and VoD Push CDN resources.
• The streaming CDN storage server, which is applicable only to VoD Push CDN resources. It is for your clients to be able to upload their video files.

Both streaming edge servers and storage servers require a Wowza charge of $50/month/instance.

On this page:

• Requirements to Provide VoD Services

• Create Video On Demand CDN Resource

  • Type Select

  • Properties

  • Edge Locations

  • Advanced Settings

Create Video On Demand CDN Resource

To add a VoD CDN resource:

1. Go to your Control Panel > CDN > Resources menu.

2. Click the "+" button in the top right corner or the CDN Resource Wizard button.

3. Follow the steps of the CDN resource creation wizard:

Type Select

Click VOD to select the required resource type, and then click Next to proceed.

Properties

• CDN hostname – specify the name which will serve as a label only

  For VoD CDN resources, a CNAME is not required to be set for a CDN hostname, as the CDN hostname is not used. For example, if the CDN hostname is cdn.domain.com, the video files are always served from video.domain.com.
  A CDN hostname is used for labelling purposes in Control Panel.
  If the CDN hostname of a VoD resource has a configured CNAME, e.g., xxx.r.worldcdn.net (where xxx is a resource ID), a message with a Wowza version will appear by default when visitors access the CDN hostname.

• Content origin – specify the content origin type PULL or PUSH

If you have selected the PULL type, specify the origin. This is where your VOD video files are located at. For example if your video files are hosted at http://example.com/video.mp4, then please fill in "example.com" in the origin field.

If you have selected the PUSH type:

• Storage server location - choose the storage server location from the drop-down list. Creating VOD PUSH resource would require you to upload the Video files to "CDN Storage Server" via FTP, so you will need to create a CDN storage server beforehand. Our system would then push the files from CDN storage servers to the Wowza edge servers
• FTP password - specify the FTP password. It can consist of 6-32 alphanumeric characters

• FTP password confirmation - confirm the password

Edge Locations

Tick the checkbox next to the edge group(s) which will share the resource added. Available edge groups depend on the assigned bucket limits.
The map displays own, subscribed and available CDN resources. If you click a location icon on the map, the city name and country name of the location appear:

 Map legend:

Advanced Settings

Country Access

Configure a rule to enable/disable access to the CDN resource’s content for specified countries.

• Access Policy – select the Disabled option to switch off a rule or Block by default. If the access policy is set to block by default, fill in the Except for Countries field to specify countries to which the access policy won’t be applied. To select more than one country, hold Ctrl during selection.

Hotlink policy

• Hotlink policy - select the Disabled option to switch off hotlink policy security: otherwise choose Block by default. If the hotlink policy is set to block by default, fill in the Except for domains field to specify the domains to which the hotlink policy won’t be applied.

Cache expiry

• Cache expiry – set the cache expiry time in minutes (min=1, max=35000000).

  For a VoD Push CDN resource, video files are cached on the streaming edge servers for 24 hours.
  For a VoD Pull CDN resource, video file caching honors the expiry host header from the origin. If the origin sends a max-age=1000, it means that the video files will be stored for 1,000 seconds.

Ignore Set-Cookie

• Ignore Set-Cookie - tick this checkbox to enable caching content with Set-Cookie response headers.

Search Engine Crawlers

• Block search engine crawlers - move the slider to the right to block web crawling bots from indexing the CDN content (for HTTP Pull CDN resources only).

Secure Wowza

• Enable secure Wowza – tick the checkbox to protect your stream with Wowza secure token.

• Token for Edge/Flash player – specify the token authentication code. The authentication code will be then saved on the edge server. The token at the player side and the token at the edge server must match in order to make the video available.

  VOD setup requires the origin to send the Accept-Ranges: Bytes header in order for Wowza to make range requests to the Nginx cache.
  Amazon S3 does not send the header by default. For this, add the Accept-Ranges: Bytes header to the files stored in Amazon S3.

Token Authentication

• Enable Token Authentication - tick the checkbox to enable token authentication.
• Token Auth Primary Key - specify the secret key to be used with the scripts which generate token.
• Token Auth Backup Key - input the backup key which can be used if you want to change the primary key. To make sure the link generated with existing token won't be broken, the suggested procedure is the following:
  
  • Copy the existing primary key and paste to the backup key. 
  • Fill in a new primary key.
• Protected Path - specify the protected path. By default it is "/". Only the Path inserted is allowed to be streamed.

Now proceed with running the .NET or JAVA scripts to complete the procedure.

4. Click Create CDN Resource.