IIS7 - Media

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:03:24 GMT

Another way to diagonise this issue is to turn on Failed Request Tracing on IIS7 and see whether the server has received the client's .ism request.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:01:06 GMT

One thing to note here is that for .wmv files that are played back directly by Silverlight runtime, cross-domain restriction is not enforced. Smooth streaming files (.ism) are handled by a Silverlight extension called Media Stream Source which is subject to cross-domain restriction. My hunch is that it's still someting related to cross-domain issue.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

tjader — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:29:55 GMT

jboch:

This entry gets interpreted by the logic in the XAP loaded into Silverlight. To change media location (if, for example, the media is on a different server), replace the .ism entry with an absolute path (e.g. mediaSource="http://myserver.mydomain.com/MyVDir/MyPresentation.ism/Manifest")

If your media is hosted on a server a different domain, you'll need a clientaccesspolicy.xml file on the media server's root for everything to work correctly. Look here for details.

This is exactly what I want and try to do but it's not working. I'm testing on same machine and domain so it shouldn't be cross domain. If I just make a .wmv file and put that in the same place and use that url, the player works. And it works when the player i in the same dir as in the sample and i'm not using the absolute path. Well I guess I have to try more...

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

jboch — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:08:53 GMT

tjader - thanks for your questions! I'd like to clarify a couple of things about how the Silverlight control is intialized from the web page that should help. In order to play content, you will need three things:

A Web page with an <object> tag that creates hosts the control
A XAP (Silverlight application package) that the <object> tag loads
A set of initialization parameters (initParams) that get supplied to the logic in the XAP

The sample content package include the BlackGlass.html file which provides an example. If you look at the source for BlackGlass.html in a text editor, you should see all three of these element in action:

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"></object>

This is pretty much mandatory. You can change the visual display attributes but the data and type attributes pretty much need to appear as they are in the sample file.
The other <param> tag below reside inside the <object> tag.

<param name="source" value="SmoothStreamingBlackGlass.xap"/>

This is the reference to the XAP. If your XAP is hosted on a different server, you'll need to supply an absolute URL (e.g. <param name="source" value="http://myserver.mydomain.com/myVDir/myXAP.xap" />). Otherwise, the value of this parameter is interpreted as relative to the html file.

<param name="initparams" value='autoplay=True,muted=False,stretchmode=0,displaytimecode=False,playlist=<playList><playListItems><playListItem title="Big%20Buck%20Bunny" description="" mediaSource="Big%20Buck%20Bunny.ism\Manifest" adaptiveStreaming="True" thumbSource="Big%20Buck%20Bunny_Thumb.jpg" frameRate="24.0000384000614" ></playListItem></playListItems></playList>' />

This entry gets interpreted by the logic in the XAP loaded into Silverlight. To change media location (if, for example, the media is on a different server), replace the .ism entry with an absolute path (e.g. mediaSource="http://myserver.mydomain.com/MyVDir/MyPresentation.ism/Manifest")
If your media is hosted on a server a different domain, you'll need a clientaccesspolicy.xml file on the media server's root for everything to work correctly. Look here for details.

Hope this helps and let us know if you have any further questions.

--John

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:47:22 GMT

Correction:

Is it that your client xap file comes from a different domain than your ism file?

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:46:29 GMT

Is it that your client xap file comes from a different URL than your ism file? If that's the case, I think you're hitting the corss-domain restriction in Silverlight. You either need to move the xap file to the same server as your media contents or setup cross-domain policies.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

tjader — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:43:13 GMT

Yes, the ism file is colocated with the other files. the problem is that as soon as I try to reference the file in Silverlight player with a url in the form of www.mydomain.com/myfile.ism instead of just myfile.ism as in the sample, it fails. It is on a webserver, not a media server, sorry for not being clear. With media server I mean our server were we are hosting the media files and not the server were the web pages exist serving the clients.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:33:27 GMT

With smooth streaming, your media server could just be your web server since it's running on IIS7. The .ism file needs to be co-located with the media files it references. Actually a better way to think of it is that .ism file is part of the "media presentation" which contains manifest files and the video files.

Thanks,

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

tjader — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:56:02 GMT

I'm trying to get this to work. How can I play a mediafile when I have the full path 'http://www.mycomain.com/myfile.ism'. In other words how should I reference a file when the webserver and mediaserver are on different machines? The sample works as expected but I need to be able to play files from different servers.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

jboch — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:36:29 GMT

The IIS Smooth Streaming Beta is now available. Please see the announcement for details, and use this thread to provide your feedback:

http://blogs.iis.net/jboch/archive/2009/02/24/beta-release-of-smooth-streaming-now-available.aspx

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:41:43 GMT

You can use Microsoft Expression Encoder 2 SP1(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A29BE9F9-29E1-4E70-BF67-02D87D3E556E&displaylang=en) to encode and generate the files that are needed for IIS Smooth Streaming. It also allows you to directly publish to IIS using WebDav. Along with the media files and server config files, Expression Encoder generates a XAP file that contains a sample implementation of the client side managed code module. Better yet, you can find the source code and Visual Studio solution/project file for the sample implementation in Expression Encoder's template directory. So with that, you can do whatever you want to plug in your own logic and build your own Silverlight player.

The server module will be a future release of IIS Media Pack running on top of IIS 7.0. The current plan is to release it in Q1 2009.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

One_adm12@hotmail.com — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:05:24 GMT

Will the managed code module be extensible? How would we configure or override the logic to determine the switching? There are many cases where we may want to restrict, or allow certaing behaiviours or capabilities. For instance only allowing the hight bit rates only to premium subscribers.

Will this be supported for Live events also?

How does the file chunking work? Is that part of the encode/distribution process? Or is IIS handling this similar to byte range requests? Are their content management tools planned for managing the different encode profiles and the distribution of those files?

Also, when is a beta planned? I'm excited to get my hands on this stuff!

Thanks!

Adam

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:16:25 GMT

Adam, thanks for the feedback.

IIS Smooth Streaming is supported by Silverlight 2.0. There's a seperate managed code module running on top of Silverlight runtime that's doing the smooth streaming logic. The managed code module is automatically downloaded as a Silverlight XAP app.

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

One_adm12@hotmail.com — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:02:46 GMT

Looks pretty good. Although still not quite as good as the Move Network plugin and encoding. I noticed quite a lot of artifacting especially during quality level switchs between http://video.smoothhd.com/Media/AD_Streaming/NBA.ism/QualityLevels(1500000)/Fragments(video=3130120746)and http://video.smoothhd.com/Media/AD_Streaming/NBA.ism/QualityLevels(2000000)/Fragments(video=3267924804)also vertical movement cause distortion on the high action scenes. But overall very nice! BTW, what version of Silverlight will this be supported in? I don't see anything in the Silverlight media documentation about bit rate switching or how to control the quality switching ie.. what factors to base the switch on. But maybe I'm missing something.
Thanks,

Adam Smith

Re: IIS Smooth Streaming Feedback Thread

samzhang — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:44:04 GMT

It only supports Silverlight clients. Thanks.

-Sam