Windows Media Services & Windows 2008
I missed something important about Windows Media Services WMS in Windows 2008. A lot of the features that were previously only available in Windows 2003 datacenter or Windows 2003 Enterprise editions are standard in Windows 2008! Yipee and about time!
The inability to write custom authentication plugins except for the advanced windows versions prevented an old project from actually being viable. Now custom authentication plugins will work for me.
The new 2008 version is reportedly much more efficient and up to some serious traffic and has some other very relevant to features to some work I cant talk about;
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- Cache/Proxy Management
- Server Core Installation
- Advanced Fast Start
- Play While Archiving
- Advanced FF/RW
- Broadcast AutoStart
- Absolute Playlist Time
- Encoder Failover URL Modifiers
- Additional Windows Server System Platform Support (x64)
Quote from features page,
Increased scalability. Windows Media Services reduces costs by enabling economical streaming for the largest enterprises and content delivery networks (CDNs). You can increase the scalability of Windows Media Services in the following deployment scenarios:
Run Windows Media Services on x64-based versions of Windows Server 2003 to increase scalability up to 40 percent.
Add the Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack to your Windows Media server to increase scalability by an additional 40 percent.
Upgrade the Windows Server 2003 operating system on your Windows Media server to take advantage of the new network offloading technologies in Windows Server 2008 and nearly double the scalability of Windows Media Services. For more information about installing Windows Media Services on Windows Server 2008, see Update the Windows Media Server Platform.
Install Windows Media Services on a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 to provide base Windows Media server functionality, thereby increasing server availability.
You can also maximize scalability of rich-media delivery in Windows Media Services by extending multicasting capabilities beyond audio and video content to include Web pages, slides, and images.
It is time for me to dust off those old ideas and get coding – oh and i have to look at what Silverlight brings to the party in this area too.
Server 2008 - Windows Media Services Features
Implementing an Authentication Plug-in for Windows Media Services