VOD Application Troubleshooting
By: Stefan Richter
This post should be read in conjunction with my previous one about virtual directories with the FLVPlayback component and FMS.
I just needed to troubleshoot a client’s FMS installation. Videos are organised in a deep structure of subfolders and to be delivered via the standard VOD application of Flash Media Streaming Server. I was using the FLVPlayback component to make sure the videos were playable. Once again it became apparent that the FLVPlayback component needs to be fed with an application instance name as soon as you try and deliver files that are not inside the toplevel /vod/media folder.
As you may know, the VOD application is by default configured to live (on Windows) at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flash Media Server 3\applications\vod while its files are stored at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flash Media Server 3\applications\vod\media. Both setting can be configured either in fms.ini or directly in FMS’s XML conf files.
I needed to remap the VOD directory from VOD_DIR = C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flash Media Server 3\applications\vod\media to a new location. This worked fine. However as soon as I started to create subfolders inside /media I was no longer able to stream the videos using the FLVPlayback component. Luckily - and through past experiences - I knew that this was an instance problem. So instead of setting FLVPlayback’s source to rtmp://myserver.com/vod/subfolder/myvideo I added an instance name - any instance name - such as rtmp://myserver.com/vod/inst/subfolder/myvideo and voila, the video would play again.
Hopefully this information will save somebody some grief.
