Hi.  I apologize if this question has already been answered, but I scrounged around for more than an hour and couldn't find anything that pertains to my issue.

I've uploaded an AVI file and referenced it via an instance of the media module.  Technically, it works.  The problem is that when I view the web page, the media player ActiveX control (when viewed via Internet Explorer) downloads the entire AVI file before it starts playing it.  I would like to have media player start playing after it buffers a small around of the AVI file, first.  In other words, I would like the AVI file to be streamed.

How do I know that this is what's happening?  When I load the page, the media player control is black.  My hard drive has steady activity for several minutes.  Then the Media Player Control starts playing the video.

Here's my configuration:
          DNN                 04.05.01
          Media Module        03.02.03

Is there a MIME type setting or some other setting in IIS that needs to be tweaked?

If this is issue that can't be fixed, does anyone know of a 3rd party module that will stream video?

Thanks,
Van

Streaming is possible only if the Windows OS is either installed/configured as a Windows Media Server (eg Windows Media, and is possible with all Windows Media servers) or a Streaming Server application installed (all other formats).

Been awhile, but I set up Windows streaming on DNN many years ago... it's relatively simple.

1. Install and configure Windows Media Server.
2. Create metafiles for each media file  This recommended instead of pointing directly to the media file itself.
3. From the Windows Media SDK (free download from Microsoft), copy the HTML code for an embedded Windows Media Player and paste into a Text/HTML DNN module.
4. Configure the embedded Windows Media Player to point to the metafile(s) for the appropriate media streams.

I also recommend taking a look at what the Windows Media SDK can do for you re-compiling your media.Besides optimizing for streams, you can also create multi-stream files which will automatically stream at the appropriate speed of the client connection.

HTH,

Tony Su

Hi Shane,

IIRC you must have used the option to create a website when you installed/setup Windows Media Services. If you did this on the same machine as your DNN webserver, you shouldn't have done that or should know how to re-configure to provide only streaming services (main problem is possible website contention, but otherwise is probably not a big deal but I just never do things that way so can't say for sure). Note that the streaming content doesn't have to be (but can be) served from the same box as the DNN webserver, it makes little difference if it's served from another box or even another site on the Internet.

For anyone interested in this, here are the nuts and bolts.

First, as others have posted if you don't install a streaming server application (like Windows Streaming Server/Service which can be installed free on any Windows Server going as far back as NT4), the file will be downloaded completely before it can be played.

When you install a streaming server, the file can be "streamed" by serving the file from the streaming server application to a media player running on the client. To make things convenient, you can embed a player in a webpage either by web browser plugin (like Flash) or by calling a separate player already installed on the machine (like Windows Media Player).

So, describing the recommended setup in just a little more detail...

• Install Windows Media Streaming services on a Server (can be the same as the DNN webserver but can be any server on the Internet).
• Configure the Streaming server, usually pointing to the directory media repository and assigning a URL mimimally.
• Compile/optimize your media content for streaming/streams.
• Recommended practice although often not required is to create metafiles that describe the file(s) to be streamed instead of pointing the client directly to the file
• Install and configure a DNN media module. Although the DNN module described in this forum should work and is more versatile, in the past i've just installed the DNN HTML module and pasted the code to display the WMP in a web page. The code is widely available, one source is here

http://www.streamalot.com/wm-embed.shtml

• Lastly, configure the embedded player (or whatever) to point to the metafile you created, not the actual media file.

Remember that this method of invoking an embedded Windows Media Player requires the client to be runnig Windows, it won't invoke a third party app capable of playing windows media files which would be the case on something like Linux or Mac.

One further comment... you described pushing live content to your website and then in turn streaming to at least one client. Be aware that requires very heavy resources, and typically there is special hardware costing multiple thousands of dollars to do that, but you can see for yourself how far you can go with lesser hardware. Both the Windows Media Encoder (free download from MS) and third party solutions like VLC(also free) provide capability to re-broadcast live streams. I'd recommend at the very least you deploy on the beefiest hardware you can afford running 64-bit. And, of course provision your bandwidth to support both inbound and outbound traffic at whatever bandwidth you want to support.