WMT Streaming with a CE

mark.duffy · ‎02-25-2005

I've posted about this subject before because its pretty vague and I've yet to speak to anybody who's got it working in the UK.

Basically I have some channels configured that suck in some video's from a webserver (that doesn't have streaming media services on it).

I then want to reference the files via the CE with the users IE configured to point to the CE with the files on (in the CDNFS partition you can see them), the clients Windows Media Player is also configured to point to the CE as an MMS proxy 1755 etc. The CE is licensed for WMT and running because I can connect to the CE and look at the WMT stats which shows me its running.

In media player you can open a url directly and I always refer to the true origin server for the video and it doesn't work.

I've tried creating .asx files as disucssed in other posts that point to the origin server with: -

mms://server ip/videos/video1.asf

All the video's are .asf streaming encoded files, I know this for a fact. The manifest file is simple in that it has a crawler, ttl=1 and playerserver etc.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<host name="ftp://192.168.10.155/"

proto="ftp"/>

</server>

<crawler

server="source-tag"

ttl="1" aternateUrl="http://192.168.10.155/cdn-error.html"

start-url="/videos/"

playServer="wmt">

</crawler>

</CdnManifest>

I've then tried creating a asx file as per the notes,

<Entry>

</Entry>

</ASX>

So my questions are:-

1) Have I missed the point of CDN redirection using a proxy (WCCP isn't an option for redirection) ?

2) Do I have to create .asx files and if so I assume they point to the origin server? mms://192.168.10.155/videos/video.asf

3) Do you need to have Microsoft Windows Media services on the origin server?

4) Is my manifest correct?

I would really, really welcome either email discussion with somebody who's got this working or via the thread because I'm struggling trying to find help within Cisco or externally. The manuals just don't fill in the gaps and contradict themselves on setting it up.

Many thanks

kind regards

Mark

seilsz · ‎02-25-2005

Hi Mark,

Can you provide some additional information about your topology and exactly what you are trying to accomplish? If I read your post correctly, you are trying to preload some Windows Media videos from a web server to your CE(s), and have clients access those videos using the CE as a forward proxy? Is that correct?

What is not working? What does the client see? Are you managing your CE's with a CDM? Can you post a copy of your CE configuration?

Thanks,

Zach

mark.duffy · ‎03-01-2005

Hi Zach

Thanks for the reply, after a bit more playing around I appear to have it working.

The goal was to have CE's managed by a CDM (5.1) latest version, configure a channel to pull a large number of video's in from a webserver. The CE is licensed for WMT and the origin server has no streaming services on. I was to prove the concept that you can call a video when your browse and media player are pointing to a CE which has WMT enabled on it to play back from the CE the videos.

I suspect it was perhaps something to do with preserving authentication for the videos to the origin server that messed things up. My final working manifest has this removed and appears to work.

You can call a video now from the CE using mms://origin IP/videos/video.asf (I put this in the browser URL) and it happily opens media player and plays the video.

If you then connect to the CE (https:8003) and look at the WMT stats, active streams its shows the video played over MMS:UDP and source as LOCAL. I proved it again by unplugging the origin server and calling the video again and it plays in the same way as source LOCAL.

So I guess the answer to my question is, yes you can position the videos via a channel and then call them direct from the CE without the Origin server being available and with it not having streaming services.

Incidently if the origin server has streaming services then it all works but under active streams you see the source of the video as remote and the CE then pulls from the Origin Server and streams to the CE which in turn caches the video and serves to clients.

I tested this using a number of videos in different combinations to be sure that it was serving from the location I expected. The final test was calling a video specially loaded that I'd never played on my laptop, disconnecting the origin server once the video had replicated (cdnfs browse) to the CE and calling mms://.... and it playing local.

Sorry this is a long drawn out response but hopefully the content will serve useful for other people.

Also for reference you don't appear to need .ASX files, they do work but don't appear to be a requirement. A straight MMS call is all that was needed.

kind regards

Mark

Zach Seils · ‎03-01-2005

Thanks for the good information, Mark.

~Zach