Question

I have smooth streaming working on my local machine. The video plays nicely and it’s working as expected but when I copy the same files to azure blob storage and to azure cdn, it does not work. I have setup azure websites with azure sql, azure blob storage and azure cdn. Everything works except the streaming. I’m able to access pictures and other stuff from cdn. When I type the mediaURL with .ism/Manifest, I do not get any xml (but I do get a download prompt without /Manifetst). What am I missing? Should I enable smooth streaming somewhere in the cdn? PLEASE HELP!

Answer 1

This might be caused due to the fact that you didn’t change the content type to text/xml (this is probably why you’re getting a download prompt).

Instead of trying to manage all of this yourself I suggest you take a look at the Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs Uploader project, which has some nice features:

• Upload video content to Windows Azure via a command-line tool (AdaptiveStreamingAzure.exe)
• Upload video content from within Expression Encoder 3 via a publisher plugin.
• Easily publish Smooth Streaming content produced with Expression Encoder, including player templates.
• Automatically enable cross-domain access for easy embedding of videos.
• Resume aborted uploads.
• Integrate with CDNs (including the Windows Azure CDN) and control their cache policies.
• Parallelize storage operations to decrease upload time.
• Automatically check for new versions of the software.

Read more about this on Steve’s blog: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/smooth-streaming-with-windows-azure-blobs-and-cdn

Besides that I suggest you also take a look at the new Media Services which has been launched as preview just recently: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/media-services (there is a sample to deliver streaming content)