Archives
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How to authenticate ONLY the encoder streams but not the clients for live smooth streaming?
This question was asked quite a few times from our customers and on the media forum. The scenario is that I, as an site administrator, want to authenticate encoder streams that are pushing in for live smooth streaming. However, I don’t really want all the smooth streaming players having to do the same authentication. This is definitely a valid and reasonable scenario. An analogy is that I want to authenticate users who want to upload content to my web site without the need to authenticate the browsers.
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How to Troubleshoot Live Smooth Streaming Issues? – Part 7 (Putting It Together)
In previous sections, we discussed many different ways of diagnosing live smooth streaming issues. Now, let’s go through a troubleshooting example to see how to use them in real world debugging.
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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.