Server Side Playlist Creation

February 2, 2009 3

Introduction


Windows Media metafiles, commonly known as playlists, allow you to schedule on-demand content to play like a television channel  every connecting viewer will see the same content at the same time. You can add the on-demand content with live content from an encoder for any desired length of time.
The following will guide you in creating a playlist. Once this is done, you can view the following solution to load your playlist on to the NetroMedia matrix: Loading a Server Side Play List in the StreamingPortal

Creating a Simple Metafile


To get started creating a simple metafile, open your favourite text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad, and type the following items:



Path"/>


In the third line, replace Path with the path or URL of your Windows Media–based content using a syntax from the following table.

Source of content Syntax
File on a Windows Media server http://Playerlink/FileName.wmv
Content from an Encoder http://encoderIP:portnumber
The Playerlink is shown in your Active Service Detail in NetroPortal


After you type this into Notepad, save the file as Filename.wvx if it is used to redirect video files that have a .wmv extension. Save the file with a .wax extension if it redirects audio-only files that have a .wma extension. Typically, Filename is the name of the Windows Media file or stream, but it can be any name you choose. Check to be sure that the metafile is working by double-clicking its file name in Windows® Explorer. Windows Media Player should open and start streaming the content.


Example Playlist


Playlists are powerful and flexible. With playlists, you can schedule content to play in succession, or you can insert advertising or special-interest clips into a presentation after a specific period of time or at a specific point. Windows Media Services and Windows Media Player work together to play the clips in a playlist with minimal buffering time or interruption between clips.

The simplest playlists are created by adding multiple ENTRY elements to a metafile. Here’s an example of a simple playlist:






The clipBegin feature allows you to define when content will play. When using the clipBegin feature in a playlist, the time format is as follows:

Example Description
08:30:00 The media will start or stop streaming at 8:30 A.M. UTC/GMT on the current date.
2009-01-31T00:00:00 The media will start or stop streaming on January 31, 2009 at midnight, UTC/GMT.

To play content on your local time, edit the first time entry to match your time, relative to GMT.

e.g. 14:00-00:00 would play content at 2pm GMT. If your local time is GMT -8, you would use 06:00-00:00.

If you do not place a date in the clipBegin entry, your playlist will play that content each day. Placing a datestamp on the clipBegin entry will only play the content on that day.

clipBegin entries are not a requirement. You can load a playlist without these values, and it will play. If you do this, it is important to loop the playlist.

Here is an example of a looping playlist, which will also look for live content at a specific time. If it fails to connect to the encoder, the OD content will continue to play. If found, the live content is set to play for a little over half an hour, (18:27 – 19:00) and then loop back to the OD content.







 

Advertising Content

To ensure that your advertising content is correctly tracked, you must add a definition to each advertisement item, as follows:

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