Punk Rock CTO

There is a ton of confusion about what smooth streaming actually is and what it does. I Figured I would try and write a quick breakdown.

An introduction to Smooth Streaming

What the heck is Smooth Streaming?

Smooth Streaming is an extension to IIS 7 that enables the streaming of media to Silverlight clients over the web via adaptive streaming. It makes true HD streaming a reality and is extremely scalable. This was put to the test during the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Ok so what is adaptive streaming and how is it different?

Adaptive Streaming is a delivery method of media where rather than having to download the entire file and play it, a series of short HTTP downloads are delivered to the client. With these short bursts a client can dynamically switch from higher and lower quality depending on available  bandwidth and CPU power.

Sounds great, how can I use it?

Clients viewing the media would require Silverlight 2 or greater. For Linux viewers Moonlight 2 also supports Smooth Streaming.

If your encoding software does not  support the Smooth Streaming format you will have to upgrade it. Personally I use and like Microsoft Expression Encoder 3, but there are others you could use.

On our Elastic Shared Product MaxESP Smooth Streaming is already installed and ready to use. For steps and a video showing it off on MaxESP take a look at the video at the bottom of this KB. If you are running your own IIS7 server you will need to install the extension for IIS7 .

What about my old content?

Unfortunately to take advantage of Smooth Streaming you would have to re-encode and upload your content.

IIS 7, Tech smooth streaming, iis 7

I kept hitting my head against a wall with an FTP issue on IIS 7 that I thought I would share incase others are seeing it too. In my situation I was using IIS 7 in a shared config setup.  When creating a new site, either through appcmd or through the GUI, we were seeing an odd behavior with FTP.

The website would work fine but FTP acted wonky. Through any ftp client when you try to connect you would get "530 Valid hostname is expected." If you look at the site in IIS and Go to Manage FTP Site if you restart, start, or stop you get the popup error:
There was an error performing this operation.
Details:
Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070490)
 
Strange thing is there are a hundred sites on the servers that you can connect to and restart FTP fine for. It was only an issue for new sites we were creating. Unbeknownst to me the problem was IIS had lost connection at some point to the file server (the server was rebooted) where IIS is pointing for the shared config.

So here was the fix that I came up with. Anytime the storage location "disappears" for IIS 7 in a shared config (File Server reboots, Clustered Volume fails over, network issues, etc.) you simply need to reset the ftp service. Previously on IIS 6 you could do this with a simple IISReset, on IIS 7 you will want to run "net stop FTPSvc" and then "net start FTPSvc".

Hopefully if you are running into this same issue this article was helpful to you.

Tech, IIS 7 ftp, iis