Overview

If you are configuring Azure Media Services for content storage along with their advanced encoding services, VIDIZMO provides an ease to its customers by either automating the configuration process via VIDIZMO Setup Wizard or performing the configuration manually. 


Some organizations prefer configuring their Azure storage manually since they may have a policy to allow only certain users to make changes to their Azure AD or Azure subscription and they may not want an application (an automated process) making changes on their behalf using a service account. If so, you may contact our support for further assistance with the manual setup. 


Setup Wizard allows you to initially set up your Portal's Storage Provider and Transcoder for a seamless user experience throughout the application usage. It takes you through a series of easily configurable steps to help set up the system.

There are various other storage and encoding providers that you may configure using Setup Wizard. To learn more about it, read Understanding Setup Wizard.


Here is how you can start with your AMS configuration:


Before you start

  • You need to be an Administrator or Manager to configure your portal's content provider and encoding provider. 
  • Your previous content will remain intact and will be served from your pre-configured storage provider unless you choose to migrate data. In case of data migration, old content is copied (not moved) to the new content storage and the copy of the content residing on older storage is purged based on the policy set in the portal.


Azure Configuration

Following are the steps to be performed in Azure Portal before you run the Setup Wizard:


Azure Portal Considerations

1. VIDIZMO portal will require you to enter a set of Azure user credentials while running Setup Wizard. The user whose credentials you use to configure your Azure Media Services storage account should be a Member in your Azure Active Directory and should have an Owner role in the subscription under which you create your storage account. This will help the application connect with your application through Azure AD and have required access rights to create your storage account and media service associated with it. Here is how you can ensure it:

i. Use this tutorial to navigate to the Users page and check if your UserType is Member and Source is Azure Active Directory. If not, add a new user to your Azure Active Directory using the default Azure AD Tenant domain e.g. <user>@<yourdomainname>.onmicrosoft.com. To learn more about it, read: Azure AD User Properties.


Note: Make sure the user is part of a single Active Directory Tenant. To learn more about Azure tenant, Single-tenant and Multi-tenant, read: Terminologies in Azure AD.


ii. Now using the Member account, go to Azure Subscriptions and check your role and permissions. It should be an Owner.

iii. If not, this is how an administrator can assign you an Owner role in the subscription.

3. Additionally, Multi-Factor Authentication settings against that user should be turned off. Here is how you can do it:

i. Disable MFA from the Azure portal for the specific user whose credentials you will be using for setup.


Get Required Parameters

After copying your Azure AD user credentials, you need to get the Subscription ID of the subscription under which you will create your Azure storage account. To do so, go to Azure Subscriptions and copy the ID of your subscription. Along with your credentials, this ID will be later used while running Setup Wizard.


VIDIZMO Configuration

Following are the steps to be performed in VIDIZMO Portal to execute Setup Wizard:


1. From the Portal's Homepage:

i. Click on the navigation menu on the top left of your screen.

ii. Expand the Admin tab.

iii Click on Control Panel.



2. From the Manage Portal navigation pane in Control Panel:

i. Select Setup Wizard.

ii. Click on Run Wizard Again.


Note: VIDIZMO provides a set of default configurations for your Storage and Transcoding Provider which can be overridden via Setup Wizard due to evolving business requirements. Furthermore, apart from the possible configurations, VIDIZMO also offers the flexibility of choosing any other Storage Providers or Transcoders that the organization may want to configure their application with. 



3.  From the Configuration tab:

i. Select the AMS to configure it as your VIDIZMO Storage for your system, from a list of available options in the drop-down.

ii. Select AMS Standard Encoder to configure it as your Encoder for your system, from a list of available options in the drop-down.

iii. Click Next to proceed to the next tab.



Configuring Azure Media Services (AMS) Storage

From the Storage tab:

i. Select Global as Subscription Type. To learn more, see: Azure Government and Azure Global.

ii. Copy the user name with the required permissions and settings mentioned here as your Login ID. 

iii. Enter the password that you use to sign into the portal using the above email address.

iv. Enter the ID of your subscription package in Azure as Subscription ID. To learn more about it, read: Azure Subscriptions and How can I retrieve my Azure subscription ID?

v. Enter the name that you want to set as Storage Name for your storage account in Azure. This name must be globally unique.

vi. Enter the name that you want to set as Resource Group Name for your resource group in Azure where you will organize your storage and media service together. This name must be unique within your Azure subscription. To learn more about it, read Resource groups.

vii. Select the physical location for your Azure servers from a list of available options in the drop-down as Location. To know more about which location would suit your needs, see: Azure regions.  

viii. Select Standard_GRS as your Replication. Having Geo-Redundant Storage enabled, your data is durable even in the case of a complete regional outage or a disaster in which the primary region isn't recoverable.  For more information about available replication options, see Storage replication options.  

ix. Select the Standard_Verizon as your CDN SKU Profile configured on your Azure CDN Account with various privileges associated with each account.  To learn more about the different options, see: Compare Azure CDN Product Features.

x. Enter the name of Media Service to be configured on your Azure Account as Media Service Name. The name has to be globally unique.

xi. Enter the number of Encoding Units which sets the number of concurrent encoding jobs/processes you wish to run.

xii. Select Standard S2 as Encoding Unit Type which corresponds to certain configuration settings in AMS for encoding.

xiii. Click Next to proceed to the next tab.


 

Configuring Azure Media Services (AMS) Encoder

From the Transcoder tab:

i. Enter the description for your Streaming Endpoint.

ii. Add units here to scale your deployment. To learn more about it, read Scale streaming endpoints.

iii. Check Enable CDN if you want to enable Azure CDN for your storage. To learn more about it, read Enable Azure CDN integration.

iv. Enter Cache which defines the number of seconds for caching content on edge nodes. 

v. From the drop-down menu, select the Media Service API Version. These APIs are used by VIDIZMO to communicate with Azure Media Services to create, manage, and maintain media workflows. To learn more about Media Service API and the difference between two versions, read Media Services v2 vs. v3

vi. Uncheck Migrate Content. It is used to migrate data from one Storage Provider to another.

vii. Enable DRM. This option enables Digital Rights Management systems such as Microsoft PlayReady, Google Widevine, or Apple FairPlay, etc on uploaded media. To learn more about how to enable DRM, see: How to Enable DRM in Portal.


Note: DRM can only be configured with Azure Media Service API Version V2.


viii. Click Done to run the setup Wizard based on the settings configured.


A notification will appear briefly stating: Setup Wizard Started Successfully.



Note: You can track the progress of the Setup Wizard with respect to Storage Provider and Transcoder configuration via Workflows. To learn more about it, see: How to View Workflows.


Read more about Azure Media Services, and other various combinations of storage and encoding providers that VIDIZMO offers: