Windows Media Services (WMS) 9.5 RTWed. Now you can grab all installation packages from MSSite. Be sure you’re downloading correct version, if you’re still using Windows 2008 RCx, you also can be able to find related WMS 9.5 RC packages from here.

I assume you’ve downloaded and put them in a local folder on your WS08 machine, the installation sequence is: Server.msu, Core.msu and Admin.msu. After you installed these three packages, you should be able to find WMS9.5 shortcut in administrative tools of control panel; but you cannot start it right now, we have something else to be done. I’m not going to introduce WS08 new features, I just tell you about the installation steps of WMS 9.5, but you may find many other system components of WS08 are similar with WMS 9.5 in installation.

Open Server Manager from control panel / administrative tools, see figure 1.

It warns you that HTTP protocol is disabled because of port conflicting to IIS7. No worries, you can do what you did in WMS9.1 to fix this.

Now, you are able to launch WMS 9.5! You should be very familiar with the WMS Admin MMC UI. The first thing you might want to do is to change the default port of HTTP protocol of WMS 9.5, don’t forget to enable HTTP, it is useful for those silverlight clients. You may notice MMS protocol option has been totally removed from WMS 9.5. That’s true and HTTP should be able to resolve the compatibility issue with Windows Media Player 6.4. MMS prefix still can be used. Protocol rollover will happen if you type and play a MMS address (e.g. mms://server/pp/test.wmv) in WMP, WMP will try to use RTSP firstly, if RTSP attempting fails, it will try HTTP. WMP will negotiate with WMS about protocol rollover, you need to not take care of it yourselves.

The most important new feature in WMS9.5 should be a built-in cache/proxy plug-in; you can set it from the cache/proxy property of root node of the server. If you have experience about the old proxy/cache plug-in sample ships with WMS9.1 SDK, you should be able to use the plug-in very quickly.

You can learn more about the benefits and new features of WMS9.5 from here.