Dave Nelson's Blog : IIS Media Services

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.

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.