Wowza Media Cache is a caching mechanism that runs on Wowza Streaming Engine™ media server software. It's designed for efficiently caching large video-on-demand (VOD) assets. It can cache assets from various sources either through networked file systems or through regular HTTP requests to a web server or storage server. It can also be used with edge server DVR workflows to cache content from an origin server application that's running Wowza nDVR.
Contents
How Media Cache works
Media Cache sources
More resources
How Media Cache works
Wowza Media Cache differs from most regular caches in the way that it caches content. With a regular cache, content is only cached once after it's completely downloaded. This is very inefficient for large VOD files and, in most cases, the files are too large for a regular cache to handle, anyway. Wowza Media Cache caches only content that's actually requested. If a user only views a short portion of a file, only that portion is cached. When another user views the same content, they'll initially get the cached content and then, after they get to the end of the cached content, Media Cache automatically starts caching the new content. After the content hasn't been watched for a period of time, it's automatically flushed from the cache to make room for new content.
Media Cache sources
Multiple content sources can be configured in a Media Cache configuration and each can be accessed separately by applications that are enabled to use the Media Cache. There are currently two types of sources: HTTP-based sources and file-based sources.
