I’ve done several SharePoint 2010 demos and presentations and it seems that almost every time I demo the new media web part that uses Silverlight to display video, I always get a lot of questions. How does it work? How much bandwidth? Can you throttle? There is a lot of interest (an indicator to me that more and more large organizations expect to use video on the web) but also a lot of concern on how to manage – especially as it relates to the network bandwidth.
I’ve done some research and there are really multiple considerations here.
The best single link is a fairly new Technet article on caching and performance planning with SharePoint 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424404(office.14).aspx Summary: performance can be tuned through disk-based BLOB caching and bit rate throttling
Bitrate throttling configuration walkthrough http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/148/bit-rate-throttling-configuration-walkthrough/ Summary: detailed guide from the IIS team
More direction on where we’re going with streaming (the out-of the-box media web part uses buffering, NOT streaming. Streaming is enabled via IIS media services) http://misfitgeek.com/blog/iis-media-services-3-0/ Summary: good overview of IIS Media Services 3.0
And finally, Silverlight 4 capabilities, including multicasting. Currently SL4 is in beta: http://scorbs.com/2009/11/19/pdc-session-silverlight-4-beta-overview/ http://blogs.msdn.com/ncl/archive/2009/11/18/udp-multicast-in-silverlight-4.aspx
I realize this is a lot of links but I wanted to provide a complete picture, since there is a lot coming down the pipe. Between SharePoint 2010, IIS Media Services, and Silverlight 4 we’ll have a very powerful toolkit for almost any web-based video display scenario!
Good luck!
If we're looking at playing large sized videos and not as concerned about the storage, what would you recommend from a performance standpoint?
Hi Chetan,
It depends what you mean by large-sized videos. In some cases I have customers that store a handful of 20-100 MB videos in a SharePoint document library and that works well for them. For a broader video-based solution (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) it might make better sense to store the videos outside of a SharePoint content database and reference from SharePoint.
Hope that helps,
Nate
I need some good help to get my problem sorted. I am trying to implement video streaming through SharePoint 2010. As it says above in the article that SP 2010 out of the box doesn't support streaming but buffering, however this can be achieved through IIS Media Services.
Can someone please tell me how will this be configured to work with IIS Media Services?
Will the videos be stored in content DB or on file system?