I've completed a small test of Smooth Streaming at my DiscountASP.NET account and it worked great. Very pleased about that. My hat is off to DASP. Now, I'm looking ahead. I'm using VS 2010 and Silverlight 4, and am building a web application that, among other things, will allow a user to view a 10 minute video, via Smooth Streaming. My typical way of developing, like most programmers, is to deploy an application, and then, over time, improve it. For example I might make some improvements on my development machine, then re-deploy (re-publish) my application to DASP. Sometimes, I may re-publish almost every day for a few days. Using Visual Studio's Build/Publish menu command, this has always been very quick and convenient for me. DiscountASP.NET makes it very easy. But now I'm contemplating a 10 minute Smooth Streaming video. The Big Buck Bunny sample video from Microsoft is 9:56 in length, not quite 10 minutes of viewing. Its size is 566 MB. So thinking ahead, I realize that if, in VS 2010, I make a folder named Video in my web application, and place a set of Smooth Streaming files there, like Big Buck Bunny, then I will probably be able to still use the Build/Publish command in VS 2010 to publish my web application up to DASP, although it might take a while to upload the 566 MB video. But then what about a few days later when I've made a few small improvements to the application on my development machine, and want to deploy them to DASP? I can't be moving 566 MB around everytime I want to make a little fix. So, my question is this: I need the ability to easily make incremental changes to my web application on my development machine, and then upload the new version to my DASP account, but avoid re-uploading the large (566 MB) 10 minute video. How to solve this? Any thoughts or ideas will be appreciated.
...Here we go; I currently do this for DASP and have done it with some extensive testing. btw, Big Buck on my Win7 64-bit is 569MB, larger than my own 10 minutes vids but not always by much. This is because Big buck was created for a larger bit rate. You do not need to encode that high. Take for example this one I just did: http://64.209.142.3/SQLdbToolsv3/default.html The Smooth Streaming files for that one are 275MB, a higher bit rate of the same one was 436MB, with no changes other than allowing for a higher bit rate. Which version of Encoder are you using? Anyway...You will not need to refresh your Smooth Streaming files once they are on the server. If you are doing your publish with VS2010 from an App you can skip folders. I can help you with this, just let me know. All the best, Mark
Mark -- That's an excellent video that you made. What if, hypothetically, you needed to protect that video from being seen my just anybody that had the link to it? I'm using "Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 with IIS Smooth Streaming" version 3.0. When you say, Do you mean when I'm using the Build/Publish menu command? I can't see any way to skip folders there. Thanks.
You could always password protect the directory, not sure if that's an option for you? You might want to take a look at this KB article if that sounds like something you might want to do: https://support.discountasp.net/KB/a398/password-protecting-directories-in-iis-7.aspx?KBSearchID=0
...True, you can lock it down if you need to. Do you have Expression Web? (version 3 or 4) I find it does a much better job deploying the smooth streaming files than VS does, much better job, way better in fact. ;-) Thanks for the positive feedback btw, I don't get very much of that, very much appreciated. btw, that video was deployed with Expression Web v4 but encoded with Encoder v3. The Pro version of Encoder v4 isn't available yet, the MSDN versions do not import MP4 and only the Pro version will once it is released. A lot of us are very upset about that...I'm for example using Expression Studio v4 Ultimate and will need to purchase the Pro version of Encoder v4, somehow I just don't understand that especially since those missing codecs are in v3. It's very confusing and I don't mean to complain but, what the heck. ;-) Back to your question about publishing, there's some info in the IIS.NET site about doing this, I'll have to find it again. So far I am not publishing any of these as Apps. Makes it so much easier to use Expression Web, multiple files at a time, great logging and it remembers all of your settings. Sweet. All the best, Mark
Keikoraca -- Thanks. Wisemx -- Thanks for the tips. I just tried requiring authentication via a web.config file, and it seems to work. By the way, your video has not only great visual, but also great audio. I've seen quite a few screencasts with weak sound, but yours is very clear with good volume. Just right.
