Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

  I have previously written a series of articles on how we stream media files and deliver these through SharePoint (Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3)  but these are all based in our MOSS 2007 environment now that we are moving over to SharePoint 2010 I thought I would give you a heads up on ASX files and 2010.

 We were horrified to find that when we click on an ASX file in SharePoint 2010 it did not stream the file as in 2007 but only gave us the option to save or cancel as illustrated below

Now we have found a way around this you can either change the file extension from ASX to WMV and then it works or go to Central Administration |Application Management | Manage Web Applications highlight the web application that hosts your media library and click on general settings

Once you have done that scroll down to the “Browser file handler” section

The out of the box setting is set to strict change this to permissive and then click OK no IIS reset is required and now when you click on an ASX file your video will stream.

We have in excess of 4500 so finding this setting was a god send and I do hope that it helps others.

Dave

Continuing on from my posts listing reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 I will now look at Multimedia (Assets) and announcements.

The 6 points I’m looking at regarding upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 are:

• Page based on Wiki
• Tagging / Notes / Rating
• Multimedia (Assets)
• Easier Announcements
• Web Apps
• PowerPoint Publishing

Multimedia (Assets) and Announcements

There is now an asset library in SharePoint giving you a really great place to store images and videos. The main advantage over 2007 is just the way in which images are displayed on the page. No longer do you have to suffer with a list if thumbnails, they now go across the page and happily move around to fit different browser sizes.

If you store videos in the asset library then you can play them from the browser (remember that SharePoint 2010 plays nicely with Firefox too) using the nice Silverlight viewer.

For those of you who have gone through the pain of adding pictures into announcements in SharePoint 2007 will absolutely love this feature. In my opinion this is how announcements should always have worked. Click New, insert, image from computer, browse, OK. The picture is then in and can be resized, text layout changed and announcement written!

You can see in the screen snip that there is an insert Video/Audio button. Unfortunately this is greyed out sorry as far as I’ve seen no ability to add YouTube clips OOTB…yet.

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

At Twynham it has always been our ambition to deliver all of our resources through SharePoint so with the media files that was always high on the agenda. As I said in the previous post this was version three of our media delivery solution, the first thing we discovered was the lack of resources available in fact the only book we could find on the subject was Windows media services resource kit this book proved invaluable. But the first thing to consider was the architecture needed to deliver this.

We had in early 2008 the opportunity to move our resources over to a new setup as we were setting up a new SharePoint farm it seemed the ideal timing for the move. Below you can see the SharePoint setup we decided on. The application server not only handles the SharePoint indexing service but also windows media services, this was built on a windows server 2008 64 Bit install with the application server attached directly to a Dell Power Vault MD300 with 2 TB of storage this allowed us some flexibility and future proofing with the onset of high definition video and the file sizes associated with the HD format media files.

One of the reasons for wanting to deliver our media files through SharePoint was the indexing capabilities of SharePoint as early on we decided to number our video files not name them as naming would leave us open to typo’s, we ended up with over 4000 video files all numbered but with no reference to the name. In the next part of this blog series I will tell you how we delivered the video and audio files to the end user and also touch on the sticky subject of backup and restore of your digital assets…

As I said in a previous post I would cover media streaming and how we deliver all of our digital assets through SharePoint, in the presentations that we give on our learning gateways this subject always gets a good reception as this is a great way to engage staff in the whole gateway experience. Before I get into details I thought I would take you through the media streaming journey.

 What we deliver through SharePoint now is version three of our digital media gateway this all started with the release of windows server 2000, media services was one of those hidden gems that Microsoft never seem to talk about this was not the main reason there where so many other advantages to moving from Windows NT 4 too Server 2000 with active directory and group policy deployment high on the list of big wins. So we put media services on the back burner until the release of windows server 2003 at that time is was a much more mature technology but still very much unknown. But it was not until 2005 that we started digitizing all the video tapes in the school this came about with the news that Dorset County Council where reroofing the main block during the summer holiday of 2005 this is where our server room and majority of IT suites are so I had to find work to cover us during this period.

 After much research we decided to purchase seven pinnacle studio movie boxes this gave us the ability to connect to any video recorder or DVD player through a scart lead I also purchased seven video recorders from comet (I am sure the salesman thought I was mad) and a Dell server with 8 drives bays giving us in excess of a 1 TB of local storage on the server. The call went out to staff for their departmental videos in early July and hundreds of tapes turned up we then divided up the tapes and with the help of the techies Christian Drewson, Sylvia Haghighi and Dan Rolles also family members we started the mammoth task of digitizing the schools video stock. After six weeks we had managed to get over a 1000 online this was delivered through an HTML website on the media server. With the arrival at Twynham of Darren White we did take the next step and Darren wrote a PHP website allowing us to make the delivery of digital assets to staff more automatic. But it was the next step that was our biggest leap delivery through SharePoint which I will cover in the next post……