Kevin Williams .NET and Stuff

For quite a while now, I’ve been wanting a simple video streaming solution that I could recommend to clients for whom progressive video downloads won’t cut it and who don’t want to pay to use a CDN like Edgecast or UVault or Limelight. Clients who don’t need to serve a ton of video on their site, and would be able to host it themselves if it were easy and integrated with their WebCMS.

I’ve started working on just such a solution. Right now, I’m using Windows Media Services 2008 (an optional component of Windows 2008 Server - Standard and Enterprise editions) to host and stream the videos, Sitecore to manage uploading and publishing of new videos and related content, and a Silverlight video player I found called Minoplayer. This requires that videos be encoded to WMV format, but I’m already thinking about ways to support Flash video for people who don’t want to use Silverlight (lighttpd’s mod_flv_streaming module looks promising). And of course, HTML5’s <video> element looks interesting too (although codec support problems may make it more difficult to implement).

You can see an early example of the end result of my work here - http://www.kevinwilliams.name:8001/Kologarn.aspx

(be kind to my server - I’m asking a lot from it running Sitecore, SQL Server, Media Services, and a bunch of other stuff on crappy old hardware)

I will post details of my Media Services installation and configuration experience, some information about the Sitecore solution, etc in the next few days.