Streaming Media Server Applications

Streaming Media Server. Streaming Media Servers are used in large-scale video conferences, audio and video training for enterprises; network-based on-demand video, broadcast, live broadcast, and other enterprise-level network-based media communication applications have a great future and wide application value.

 In today's streaming media server market, there are two "big names": one is the Helix Server of RealNetworks, and the other is Microsoft's Windows Media Services. The Helix Server of RealNetworks is compatible with many operating system platforms. Therefore, on a large website that provides on-demand movies, it may run Linux and other operating systems, so it can only use the Helix Server of RealNetworks. Microsoft's Media Server comes with Windows 2000 or Windows Server version, which is basically free of charge. Of course, it is a server component and it will not be installed by default. You must specify the installation.

 This article only introduces Windows Media Services, a Windows-based streaming media server, which is provided by the operating system and is easy to configure, manage, and have powerful functions. The two Windows server operating systems have different Streaming Media Server versions. The last one is the latest, known as the Windows Media Services 9 Series (see figure 1 ), it is best to run in the Windows 2003 Server operating system. In this article, we will also introduce the case of Windows Media Services 9 series based on the Windows 2003 operating system.
Figure 1:

Windows Media ServicesIt is a platform provided by Microsoft to transmit audio and video content to clients over the Internet or intranet. The client can be a PC computer or device (end user) that uses a player (such as Windows Media Player) to play the content ); it can also be another running Windows Media Services media server used for proxy, cache, or redistribution of content.

Windows MediaThe server can receive content for publishing from a variety of different "sources. Three methods are available: 1. pre-recorded content stored on the local server can also be extracted from the online file server;

2.You can use a digital recording device (camera or microphone) to record the actual situation and send it to the Windows Media Server for broadcast after being processed by the encoder (encoding software;

3. Windows Media ServicesYou can also broadcast the content transmitted from the publishing point on another remote Windows Media Server.

 If you plan to transfer live content, the server will connect to the encoding software that supports media formats (such as the Windows Media Encoder ). You can use Windows Media Encoder 9 Series (download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloa... CN & hash = c39wqb8), Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloa... p; displaylang = ZH-CN), Windows Movie Maker, etc. These software can be downloaded from Microsoft's website.

 Before introducing the setup of Windows Media Server, let's first understand what stream media is, What Is unicast and multicast "; what are professional technologies such as "on-demand broadcast release point" and "broadcast release point" and Microsoft's proprietary terms.