Question: I am an absolute beginner with this. I installed Wowza and wanted to play VOD. The test works, the sample.mp4 plays. However when I try what looks like the same URL shown in the test player, which in my case is: 

<http://192.168.5.76:1935/voddec8/mp4:sample.mp4/manifest.f4m>

I get the contents of the manifest. When I try to remove the manifest.f4m so that the URL is just:

<http://192.168.5.76:1935/voddec8/mp4:sample.mp4>

EDIT: Could it be that I need to be in a player, not a browser?

I just get info about the Wowza server:

Wowza Streaming Engine 4 Trial Edition (Expires: Jun 07, 2016) 4.3.0 build16025

What am I doing wrong?

Answer: 
Wowza does not support progressive download (meaning basic http download), you can do that with any web server. Then you could open something like this in the browser <http://192.168.5.76:1935/voddec8/sample.mp4>

If you want to play an HLS stream (playlist.m3u8) or HDS (manifest.f4m) you need to call it through a player that supports those protocols, like Jwplayer, Flowplayer,... or an application like VLC. Mobile devices (iphones, and moder Android should open HLS stream directly though.

You can also open the stream using rtmp, but you need a player (flash based) using an url like this rtmp://192.168.5.76:1935/voddec8/mp4:sample.mp4

You need to check what is the protocol best suited for you.
If you have installed wowza on local system, the URL pattern will be your IP address. You can switch wowza to listen on any port (should be open port).
Ex: rtmp://10.136.15.1:1935/vod/mp4:bunny.mp4

Instead of running it under 1935, you can switch it to listen on port:80.
You can try running your vod video in VLC player, as highlighted below.

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cvoGD.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cvoGD.png)

Once this is running, you can embed it in your application using open source media player (strobe player) : <http://matbury.com/strobe/>