Media streaming through SharePoint part 3

Now that we had all of our media files in one location it just came down to the delivery method and media library look and feel below you can see a screenshot of our media library

This gateway page is made up of basically 3 elements the media document library a search box and a recently added list. The only thing left to add was the delivery method, this could have been a list with hyperlinks to the videos but the best solution we found was ASX files and example of which can be seen below.

<asx version = “3.0″>

<entry>

<ref href = “mms://mediaserver/media/4082.wmv”/>

<Title>Episode 6</Title>

<Author></Author>

<Copyright></Copyright>

<Banner></Banner>

</entry>

</asx>

Using ASX files allows you to download the file and place on any part of the gateway where if we had used a links list we would have had to rewrite the link every time we needed to place a wrapper file anywhere else on the gateway. This also allows us to track our video resources as I stated in a previous post we numbered the videos rather than name them so as long as we maintained backups of the ASX files and video files both could be tied together. We can also tag the ASX files to help with the searches for end users a good example of this was an old Betamax video with a Volvo car in which all staff knew had a Volvo car but could never remember the title. The ASX file method would also allow hosted solutions of SharePoint to stream their own videos as the wrapper file can point to an internally hosted Windows media server but the ASX files reside on the remote server.

The next problem was backup and restore for us this is a two part process with the ASX files being backed up on a nightly basis as well as the rest of the SharePoint farms content with Avepoint Docave and with the video files we backup once a month using Symantec backup exec. We chose once a month simply because of the size and length the job takes to run (Currently three days) the most videos we would lose are around about 20 so not a total disaster.

I hope you have enjoyed this three part series on streaming media if you have any questions you can always ask through comments on the site.

Dave

Technorati Tags: How To, Media Streaming, SharePoint

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