some advice please :)

[vade]

hi guys

this weekend i will be live streaming a live event to a possible audience of hundreds could be more.

i would like some advice on if my setup can handle this.

i have just been given access to a new dedicated server with this hardware:

network 100MB up and down
Quad Core Xeon
2.4 GHz / 1066MHz
4GB dual channel Ram

we have another server where the website itself is hosted my line of thought is that if i have the website on the existing server and stream and broadcast using the new one that will help with any load problems.

my stream setup is:

camera--> high spec PC with windows media encoder --> broadband --> new server with windows media services running --> the world!

if i put the webpage on the old server and then embed a publishing point from the new server then the stream thro the publishing point will only relie on the the new server. correct?

i know this all sounds like i am out of my depth or w/e but theres a lot riding on this and i want to make sure i get this right.

thanks in advance for any help

vade

[Dave]

Yes, the stream will be between the media player and the new streaming server. However, your launch page will still get hit by 100s of people, so you may want to keep it 'lightweight'.

What's your upstream broadband capacity between the encoder and the new server ? Any contention ratios or is it guaranteed ? Tested it ? Tested it again ? Testing it from now till the event ?

What bitrate(s) are you planning on encoding your stream(s) at ? 100Mbps will get used up pretty quick with 100+ connections.

There's a load test simulator for WMS which you could/should use to test the server prior to the event.

[vade]

the broadband info i need to double check with the lads sorting that out, so ill post that tomorrow. the last 2 comps we streamed at 188 bitrate nothing really high.

i like the ideal of doing a load test on the WMS server could you possibly provide a link

thanks for coming back to me

---

btw is using windows media player as the embeded player the standard way togo or is there a better player (flash or something) which can be embedded?

[Dave]

Ok, at 188kbps, then you are probably looking at around 270 connections at 50% network capacity.

As for the load test - take a look at:
"Checking Server Performance with Windows Media Load Simulator"
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows...adsim.aspx

If you are using WMS, then either an embedded Windows Media Player, or a Silverlight player application is the usual approach.

Silverlight can give you a better cross platform/cross browser experience 'out of the box', whereas embedding WMP for every platform/browser version can be quite a challange as you need to start using some browser detection logic (and if the user has JavaScript disabled on their browser then that code will fail).

Embedding for Firefox and Gecko
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/...S.85).aspx
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=8584

You can find fully functional Silverlight media players included with Expression Encoder, or you can use the likes of the JW WMV Player.
http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-wmv-player/

If using Silverlight, you need to make sure that HTTP streaming is enabled on WMS (it's not by default).

If you don't need any fancy controls and just want some video in the web page, you can do this in Expression Blend without the need for code behind. Just drag a media element onto the canvas, set the source parameter to the WMS URL and that's all there is to it. Even adding some basic controls requires minimal effort:
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/...-playback/
(it's even easier in the later versions of Blend as it takes care of the button event handlers)

If you embed a WMP, then it's usually a good idea to also include a hyperlink below the embedded player which points to a asx or wsx metafile that allows the user to launch a standalone media player to access the stream in case of embed problems.

I'm not aware of a Flash application being able to access a stream from a WMS server, so if you want to go down that route then you would need to consider changing the back-end server.