VOD Zones store and serve media files for use in flash or RealPlayer streaming on your website. The service uses RTMP (Real-Time Media Protocol) to serve content from our storage array to your end-users.
VOD Zones for our legacy MaxCDN product are being discontinued and this feature/functionality will no longer be available, effective August 27, 2021, and any data stored in a VOD zone will be deleted at this time.
We're sure this news leaves you with a lot of questions, many of which we would like to provide answers to below. If you have questions that are not answered here, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team.
FAQ
What is a VOD Zone?
A VOD Zone is a Zone on MaxCDN designed to store and serve media files from our Storage Array to our Edge Servers. VOD Zones use a specially modified WOZA server to push content using TRMP (Real-Time Media Protocol).
You can connect to VOD Zones over FTP or SFTP for video uploads, and RTMP, RTMPT, or TRSP for direct downloads.
Why are we decommissioning VOD Zones?
This feature/functionality was developed many years ago, and it is no longer cost-effective to continue providing the current implementation.
What do I need to do?
We are requesting that you migrate your data out to the storage platform of your choice, and move to a separate transmux and transcoding platform.
How do I do that?
Rclone is a command-line tool that can be used to manage files and transfer them across multiple cloud storage providers or FTP servers. https://rclone.org/
Using this tool will allow you to copy, sync, or perform a basic move between our storage server through FTP, and your cloud storage provider of choice. This can be run locally on your personal workstation for small transfers, or within a highly available cloud compute instance for larger network connections that require higher network bandwidth.
Rclone will need to be configured for each transfer and accepts a configuration flag. To keep things clean and to prevent any accidental incorrect migrations, we recommend creating one configuration per source:destination pair.
Configure Rclone
https://rclone.org/docs/#config-config-file
You will need to use Rclone's configure tool to create 2 remote connections. The first, to your MaxCDN VOD FTP Server, and the second to your cloud storage provider of choice.
Setting up Rclone for your VOD server is as simple as running the rclone config command and selecting the SFTP connection type when prompted, and providing rclone with your FTP URL, username, and password, as configured in the MaxCDN Portal under your VOD Zone Summary page.
{screenshot}
Completed rclone config:
--------------------
[vod-test]
type = sftp
host = ftp.zane-test.zleonard.maxcdn-edge.com
user = zane-test.zleonard
port =
pass = *** ENCRYPTED ***
--------------------
Using Rclone for other services
Because we are encouraging customers to use the storage platform of their choosing when migrating their data, it is best to consult the documentation provided by your storage platform to configure rclone.
Many options will be Amazon S3 compatible, and can be configured with something similar to the following with your access_key_id and secret_access_key filled pasted in :
--------------------
[target]
type = s3
provider = AWS
env_auth = false
access_key_id = XXXXXXX
secret_access_key = YYYYYYY
region = us-east-1
endpoint =
location_constraint =
acl = private
server_side_encryption =
storage_class =
--------------------
What will happen to my data?
If you do not transfer your data to another platform, it will be removed when the hardware for our storage array is decommissioned.
Are there any StackPath supported alternatives?
MaxCDN Pull Zones can use any HTTP direct streaming method as an origin server, so if you primarily use HTTP streaming with the direct endpoint for your storage, you can set a Pull Zone to pull and cache the data from your storage platform of choice for video streaming.
StackPath CDN can use any HTTP direct streaming method as an origin server. We encourage all of our MaxCDN users to migrate to using StackPath CDN paired with storage or media transmux/transcode provider of your choice.
While StackPath CDN does not offer transmux and transcoding services out of the box at this time, customers can install 3rd party software on SP// virtual machines and containers to transmux or transcode content.
Otherwise, we recommend the use of a scalable delivery solution from your storage or media transmux/transcode provider. Our customers have had success with Wowza, Bitmovin, and encoding.com.
What will not be going away?
All other MaxCDN features will continue to function as normal, including Pull Zones and Push Zones.
How will this impact my billing?
All Zone types are billed per zone at $1 per month above your plan’s included zone amount. After VOD zones are decommissioned, you will see a reduction in the number of Zones that are reported on your invoice.
If you have any other questions or would like assistance, please reach out to our Support Team via live chat, or through ticket by emailing support@maxcdn.com.