Dave Nelson's Blog
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Updating browscap.ini for Internet Explorer 8 and 9
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.
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Using Windows Media Player Playlist Files in Web Playlists
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.
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Serving Media Content from User Folders in Web Playlists
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.
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Using HTTP for Streaming and Downloading from the Same Computer
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:
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Windows Media Server or Web Server?
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.