Random on Windows Media

I've been asked several times if Windows Media Services would be supported on Windows Server 2012. It is not. Microsoft stopped new development on WMS when Windows Media Services 2008 R2 was released. WMS is now in maintenance mode. This means that WMS...

When I was developing my first Azure Media Services application based on the how-to guide , I had a problem when I tried to initialize the CloudMediaContext. I was using code similar to: string accountName = "MyAccount" ; string accountKey = "abcdef12...

In April Microsoft announced Azure Media Services at NAB in Las Vegas. This enables encoding, encrypting, and hosting in the cloud. No longer do you have to rely on the processing power of a single (or small number) of encoding machines to convert your...

First a bit of terminology that will help keep things clear. For the purposes of this discussion I will use the term packet to mean an audio/video unit of data. Specifically this is an ASF packet based on the ASF file specification which includes WMA...

The Windows Media Load Simulator (occasionally abbreviated as 'loadsim') tool was created to help stress test Windows Media Services (WMS) servers. Since WMS does live streaming and uses application specific control messages over RTSP and HTTP using a...

One of the things I’ve found with Smooth Streaming is that people have no idea how to create a Silverlight application and run that on their web server. One of the easiest ways for most people is going to be to use the Silverlight Media Framework...

One common question I get from Windows Media Services admins who have looked through their log files is about the cause of the 408 status codes. Before answering the question directly, I need to define what a 408 is. Simply put, it is an abnormal disconnect...

For a number of years now I've had customers ask me about how to prevent deep linking from random people directly to their Windows Media server. Deep linking is described on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking . Often this occurs when a web site...

One of the main differences between Windows Media Services 9.1 on Windows 2003 and WMS 2008 on Windows Server 2008 is the inclusion of the Cache/Proxy plug-in. In WMS 9.1 you had to compile (and write some of your own code to do caching) to have cache...

Attached to this post I've included a HTML file (inside the zip) that I use all of the time to see what events the player is throwing. I've used it to see if there are scripts in a customer's video, to see how many times my player rebuffers in a particular...

In the next few posts, I am going to discuss high availability scenarios for times when you absolutely must deliver your video. For today's post, I'm going to talk about how to have an embedded version of WMP reconnect to the stream if there is an...

I occasionally get contacted by customers that are having problems keeping their Windows Media Encoder 9 Series encoder and Windows Media Services 2008 server connected. Often it is simply that the network between the two is having some issues, however...

One of the guys on my team recently tried installing Silverlight 2.0 on one of his older systems. He got the error, "Unable to install Silverlight" and, "Your processor is not supported." When you click on More information you see the error: Message...

Since this is a fairly major issue for a number of people that are running Windows Media Services 2008 , I thought this warranted it's own post. I prevously described the issue at http://blogs.msdn.com/randomnumber/archive/2008/09/05/wmp-unable-to-connect...

The next big thing in streaming is now released in beta form. That is the IIS 7 Smooth Streaming: http://www.iis.net/extensions/SmoothStreaming This is the technology that was used last summer with Silverlight for the Olympics to stream the on demaind...

This is my first post on Silverlight, so I thought I would post on a common issue that I've seen developers have problems with. Since I focus mainly on the MediaElement piece of Silverlight I'm going to stick almost solely to that on this blog when I...

When you are ripping CDs with Windows Media Player, the player can automatically go out to the Internet to retrieve the metadata describing the CD such as the album name, artist, track information, etc. If you are an artist that would like to have your...

You may have seen in a network trace that when Windows Media Player connects to Windows Media Services that if the server had Negotiate authentication enabled for the publishing point that Kerberos would fail with a Service Principal Name unknown error...

I've talked to a number of people that are having problems streaming from Windows Media Services 2008 on Windows Server 2008 when the server is behind a NAT firewall, some proxies, or load balancers. Clients on the internal network work just fine. In...

This load balancing solution will cost you a grand total of about 10 minutes of time. Now I will say that it's definitely not the best load balancing solution out there, but it's cheap and works amazingly well for something so simple. First I need...

Over the years I've talked to a number of people that want to broadcast a live video at a certain time of day. Usually this is in a corporate network where a CEO is doing a large broadcast to the entire company or something similar that needs to happen...

When Windows Media Player connects to a Windows Media server the player tries to use the most efficient protocol for the job. However, the player is not always able to connect with the first protocol it tries. This is usually due to either a firewall...

Easy automatic ASX generation In my first post, I thought it would be helpful to show how to use classic ASP to dynamically create ASX files for any file. An ASX file is essentially a shortcut or playlist file for Windows Media Player. Technically...