Instant Replays on Wowza

July 20, 2014 |   |  Comment  |  Code, streaming, Wowza

One of the useful features of Wowza is its ability to record a stream to disk and then be able to use that recording for a replay. In version 3.5, it would simply take the stream name, slap an MP4 extension on the end, and version any previous ones with _0, _1, etc. In 3.6, the default naming scheme for these recordings was a timestamp, with a configuration option to use the legacy naming convention. In Version 4, it appears this legacy naming convention option has disappeared altogether, meaning you can’t set up a player to just play back “streamname.mp4” and it would always grab the most recent one. EDIT: It appears that this loss of functionality was unintentional and has been classified as a bug, which should be fixed very soon.

This became a problem for one of my clients after their Wowza server got updated to V4. It wasn’t practical to re-code the player every week, or to go into the server and manually rename the file. Since it’s on a Windows server, PowerShell to the rescue:

$basepath= "C:\Program Files (x86)\Wowza Media Systems\Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0.3\content\"
$replayfile =  gci $basepath\streamname*.mp4 | sort LastWriteTime | select -last 1
$link = $replayfile.Name

cmd /c del $basepath\replay.mp4
cmd /c mklink $basepath\replay.mp4 $basepath\$link

I then put this into a scheduled task, with time-based triggers. Powershell is a little tricky to get into a scheduled task, but I finally got the syntax right:

Action: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
Arguments: -nologo -file “C:\Program Files (x86)\Wowza Media Systems\Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0.3\content\replay.ps1”

If you’re on Linux or OSX, you can do this in bash instead:

#!/bin/bash

basepath='/usr/local/WowzaStreamingEngine/content'
unset -v replayfile
for file in "$basepath"/streamname*.mp4
 do
  [[ -z $replayfile || $file -nt $replayfile ]] && replayfile=$file
 done;
rm -f $basepath/replay.mp4
ln -s $replayfile $basepath/replay.mp4

and put it in your crontab (this example is every sunday at 11:30am)

30 11 * * 0 /bin/bash /usr/local/WowzaMediaServer/content/replay.sh