Techie ASX vs. WMV,. MMS Http

Question

Can you give me some technical tips on ASZ, WMV, MMS and Http as it relates to streaming?

Answer

The links that you see in the Admin Back office Streaming tool are links to our quality of service (QoS) system.

All of these links regardless of product line go to hwcdn.net. This system only responds to HTTP requests. It does not handle the streaming of content. In the case of WMS content, both live and video on demand. It returns playlists via an HTTP request containing information regarding the highest available edge nodes serving the uploaded or live content. Therefore it would not understand MMS merely HTTP requests.

There are several ways to return this playlist information in a form that is most useful to a variety of client software.

When you use the URL currently returned by StrikeTracker with an .asx extension it returns a standard Windows Media playlist in ASX 3 format, with reference URLs to content at the edge nodes using the RTSP protocol.

When you remove the .asx portion of the extension from the URL you are returned a Windows Media playlist in ASX 2 format. This is the most basic and legacy playlist format in use today. It will return a reference URL to the content at the edge nodes using the HTTP protocol.

Additionally you can replace the .asx extension with a .wpl extension and this returns references to content at the edge nodes in the current XML Windows Media playlist format. Its included references will return URLs using the RTSP protocol.

I do not know what or how VLC supports the Windows Media file format.

However my quick tests using the most current version of VLC show that it does work using the ASX 2 formatted URLs (i.e.

http://hwcdn.net/h7k2d6t5/wms/SomeVODvideo.wmv)

The above information is true for both the WMS VOD as well as WMS Live content.

In reference to Firefox I don't how it integrates with VLC and/or Windows Media content. You may want to also look at the Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox that is produced (though maybe not supported) by Microsoft. It utilizes the actual Microsoft Windows Media libraries.

It will support any of the playlists mentioned above as well as WMS VOD and WMS Live.

http://port25.technet.com/pages/windows-media-player-firefox-plugin-download.aspx