Dave Nelson's Blog : IIS 7.0

Updating browscap.ini for Internet Explorer 8

dmnelson — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:49:00 GMT

I recently updated the Web browser on my Windows Vista computer to Windows Internet Explorer 8, and immediately discovered that I could no longer remotely administer my Windows Media server by using the updated Web browser. When I tried to open the Windows Media Services Web Administration site on the remote Windows Media server, IIS returned a Web page that incorrectly identified the Internet Explorer Web browser as a Netscape Web browser.

This issue occurred because the Windows Media Services Web Administration site (which is hosted by IIS on the remote computer) could not determine the capabilities of my client Web browser. The site's Active Server Pages (ASP) use the BrowserType object in server-side scripts to compare the User-Agent HTTP Header with entries in the IIS browscap.ini file and determine Web Browser capabilities. Unfortunately, the browscap.ini file did not have an entry for Internet Explorer 8.

If you host ASP pages in IIS that use server-side scripts to query browscap.ini for Web browser information, keep in mind that any Web browser that is released after IIS 7.0 (which contains the most recent version of browscap.ini) may be undetected or incorrectly identified, and Web pages that depend on browser detection may not be viewable. To help alleviate browser-versioning issues, Internet Explorer 8 includes a Compatibility View feature to display Web sites as viewed in Internet Explorer 7. However, for users who overlook this feature, you can replace your browscap.ini file, which is located in %windir%\system32\inetsrv, with an updated version that supports Internet Explorer 8. Click http://www.iis.net/downloads/files/media/browscap.zip to download an updated browscap.ini file in a compressed (zipped) folder.

For more information about updating the browscap.ini file to support a broad variety of user agents, I recommend that you check out the Browser Capabilites Project (http://browsers.garykeith.com/).

Using Windows Media Player Playlist Files in Web Playlists

dmnelson — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:34:00 GMT

Web Playlists, an IIS Media Services extension for IIS 7.0, includes an Import ASX Playlist feature that you can use to create server-side playlist copies of your client-side Windows Media Player playlist files. For large playlists, this feature provides a good alternative to creating server-side playlist versions of client-side playlist files from the beginning, all while preserving the presentation order of the media entries that you worked so hard to put together in the Windows Media Player playlist.

Windows Media Player 11, the default Microsoft player on computers running Windows Server 2008 creates playlists with .wpl file name extensions. For the playlists that you have already created, it is easy to create ASX copies of your WPL playlist files and import them into the Web Playlists feature for a Web site or virtual directory. Web Playlists creates a copy of the imported ASX playlist file in ISX format, which is a file with a .isx file name extension. The ISX file requires further editing in a text editor before it is available to clients, so using the import feature in Web Playlists is best for larger client-side playlists. For smaller client-side playlists, it may be just as easy to create server-side playlist versions of your client-side playlist files by using the Web Playlists user interface in IIS Manager.

For more information about saving Windows Media Player playlist (.wpl) files to ASX format, and creating and editing the Web Playlist (.isx) files, see Using Windows Media Player Playlist Files in Web Playlists.

Serving Media Content from User Folders in Web Playlists

dmnelson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:44:00 GMT

You can use the Web Playlists feature in IIS Media Services to serve media assets referenced in Web playlist files (files with .isx file name extensions), provided that the media assets (audio and video files) are stored in folders on the Web server computer that can be accessed by the Web Playlists feature. By default, these folders include the Web site root (<systemdrive>\inetpub\wwwroot). If you want to serve media assets stored in your user account folders (for example, music files stored in <systemdrive>\Users\<username>\Music>, you can create impersonation credentials in the Web Playlists feature to enable Web Playlists to connect to the media assets under the context of an authenticated Windows client. This allows you to maintain one set of media files that you can serve to customers, rather than creating copies of the files in the Web site root. This article describes how to create impersonation credentials in Web Playlists for your user account Music folder. You can use the procedure in the article for any folder on the local Web server computer that stores media assets.

Using HTTP for Streaming and Downloading from the Same Computer

dmnelson — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:08:00 GMT

By default, the HTTP Listener (HTTP.sys) for the default Web site in IIS 7.0 listens to all requests coming in on port 80 for all static IP addresses bound to the network adapter (site binding = http:*:80:). Thus, when you install Windows Media Services on the same computer, you can't stream by using HTTP. If you try to configure HTTP streaming by enabling the WMS HTTP Server Control Protocol plug-in in Windows Media Services, you'll get an error that looks something like this:

Error Code: 0xC00D158B
Error Text: One usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is permitted. Verify that other services (such as IIS) or applications are not attempting to use the same port and then try to enable the plug-in again.

There are two approaches to resolving this issue. One is to change the port that Windows Media Services uses for HTTP streaming. But if you must use port 80 for your Web traffic, another approach is to obtain another static IP address for use with your network adapter, and then configure Windows Media Services to use that IP address with port 80. Earlier versions of Windows Media Services contained the HTTP Sys Configuration tool for assigning additional IP addresses to your services, but in Windows Media Services 2008, that tool is not available and you must configure the HTTP.sys IP inclusion list by using enhanced netsh commands instead. This article describes both of these approaches in detail.

Windows Media Server or Web Server?

dmnelson — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:57:00 GMT

As promised in Chris Knowlton's Blog, we have an updated document that compares digital media content delivery from Windows Media servers (running Windows Media Services 2008) and Web servers (running IIS 7.0). You can find it here.