Sam Zhang's Blog
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 6 (IIS Logs and Others)
Since smooth streaming client requests are all standard HTTP requests going through IIS pipeline, all these requests are being logged by IIS logs which are located in %systemdrive%\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\. An example of the log entries is shown below:
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 5 (Client Manifest)
As we discussed earlier, smooth streaming client starts streaming by first requesting the client manifest from the server using URL template: http://{serverName}/{PublishingPointPath}/{PublishingPointName}.isml/manifest . The client manifest contains information such as stream types, parameters, bitrates and fragment timestamps. By simply examining the client manifest, you could get some useful information for troubleshooting live smooth streaming issues. In IIS Media Services 4.0, we made some tweaks to the client manifest format for better efficiency. The discussion below is based on IIS Media Services 4.0 release.
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 4 (Performance Counters)
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 3 (Event Logs )
The next important place to check for live smooth streaming diagnostic information is the event viewer for windows event logs. In Event Viewer, go to “Windows Logs” –> “Application” and look for events from “IIS Live Smooth Streaming” source.
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 2 (Publishing Point UI and States)
In Part one, we discussed basic data flow and protocols being used in IIS Live Smooth Streaming. In this blog, we will discuss where all the diagnostic information for live smooth streaming is available and how to make sense out of it.
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 1 (Basics)
This is a blog that I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time. Ever since the first IIS Live Smooth Streaming event (French Open in spring 2009), I’ve been directly involved in supporting many online events powered by our technologies. We have also helped our customers solve many issues through support emails and forum posts. In general, troubleshooting live smooth streaming issues isn’t that difficult once you understand the technology and know where to look and what to look for. Hopefully after reading this blog, you will feel more confident and empowered working with your live streaming servers. I would also like to suggest you reading my other blogs here and here if you haven’t done so since they’re very related.
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How to Configure HTTP Proxy Settings for Publishing Point Push/Pull Connections
If you use push/pull connection feature on IIS Live Smooth Streaming publishing points, you might run into a problem where somehow those connections failed to be established even though the same URLs work fine from your desktop applications (say Expression Encoder). If your server is behind a HTTP proxy, there is a good chance that it’s caused by the lack of HTTP proxy setting for your IIS worker process. IIS worker process by default runs under a lower privileged account and is not able to pick up the Internet Connection settings from your desktop user. The way to fix this problem is to use “netsh” command to set a machine level HTTP proxy for WinHTTP which the publishing point uses for establish push/pull connections.
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New White Paper Released on The Performance Of Adaptive Streaming Over HTTP
Cisco and The Georgia Institute of Technology just released a technical white paper on adaptive streaming here. It has some very in-depth performance analysis and comparison between Smooth Streaming, Netflix player and Adobe’s OSMF. While there are some interesting findings about all three platforms, I think it clearly shows that Smooth Streaming is far more superior than Adobe’s OSMF’s default implementation in those tests.
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Vote for future IIS Media Services features!
Tell us what features you want to see in future IIS Media Services releases and we will try our best to make it happen!
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EventID support in Expression Encoder SP1
The newly released Expression Encoder SP1 now supports EventID feature to work with IIS Media Services for live smooth streaming publishing points. Jamie Lang from the Expression Encoder team wrote a nice blog about this support.