Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) Released

I am pleased to announce that the Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) release is ready for you to download and deploy.

This release supports upgrade from the previous Go Live release. (Note: It is recommended that if you have a release earlier than Go Live, you should uninstall the old build and then use the downloads below to do a fresh installation.)

You can get the RC downloads here:

Here is a list of walkthroughs published that will help you get going with this release:

Please refer to the online readme for more details.

For general information on how Web Playlists work, please see this post.

For us, this release was primarily about two things:

  • A step towards embracing open standards - The playlist format now is SMIL-based and additionally you can output the playlist in any XML/text format. The walkthrough talks more about this feature and illustrates and example where you can use ATOM as an output format.
  • Even more thorough testing - This is incremental release over our earlier Go Live release and our test team has tested it even more than previous release

The three key new features in Web Playlists RC release are:

  • Ability to customize output format - This release enables you to change the response to a Web Playlists request to a format understood by your app. This feature works by taking and XSL style-sheet from you and transforming the ASX response according to it. The walkthrough talks about this in more details.
  • Allow Client-side Caching - Earlier releases of Web Playlists disabled the client-side caching using http headers. We got customer requests suggesting that although this is a great security feature, they would like to control this so in this release we allow you just that. You can control, whether clients can cache content or not.
  • SMIL-based playlist format - Earlier releases used a custom XML. With this release, we are moving a step closer to open standards. We are now using a SMIL-based format. While, Web Playlists does not support the entire SMIL syntax, the sub-set supported is fully SMIL compliant. For those upgrading from previous builds, there is a tool available here to convert old isx files.

We would like to hear what you feel about this release and would love to hear how you are using it.

Got more questions or need support?: Please use media forum.

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