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Alternate between live and prerecorded content in your broadcast

This quick start demonstrates how to use Windows Media Services to stream both live and prerecorded (stored) content. Despite the inclusion of stored content, users do not have the ability to pause, fast-forward, or rewind the broadcast. The user has the option of starting, stopping, and resuming the broadcast stream, creating a user experience similar to tuning in to a radio or television broadcast.

This quick start is an example of how versatile server-side playlists can be and how they are used to manipulate the playback at the client computer. For this task, you must be streaming live content from a computer running an encoder and you must have prerecorded content, such as an advertisement, in a Windows Media file. In the following procedure, the client receives five minutes of live content, which is then is interrupted for an advertisement. When the advertisement ends, the live content resumes for another five minutes.

  1. In Windows Media Services, in the console tree, click Publishing Points. In the details pane, click the View playlist editor button. The Windows Media Playlist Editor opens.
  2. Add container elements to the playlist to control how different playlist elements are played back with respect to each other. In this quick start, the publishing point will pause the content when one element interrupts another. To specify this behavior do the following:
  3. Add live content to the playlist by doing the following:
  4. In the Windows Media Playlist Editor, set the following values to define how the live content should be played back. In this example, the content will start immediately and stream for 10 minutes:
  5. To provide a unique identifier for the live content, click the id attribute in the properties area and then type a name for the media element, such as M1, in the text box. Press ENTER. This setting provides this media element with a name that can be referenced by other elements in the playlist.
  6. Add prerecorded content to the playlist by performing the following steps. In this example, the prerecorded content is an advertisement:
  7. Define how the advertisement should be played back by doing the following. In this example, the advertisement starts five minutes after the content starts:
  8. Provide a unique identifier for the advertisement by clicking the id attribute in the properties area. Type a name for the advertisement, such as M2, in the text box. Press ENTER. This provides this media element with a name that can be referenced by other elements in the playlist.
  9. Save the playlist and then close the Windows Media Playlist Editor.
  10. Use the Add Publishing Point Wizard to create a new broadcast publishing point by doing the following:
  11. Use the wizard to reference the playlist that you created in steps 1 through 9 by using the following settings:
  12. Configure the following publishing point settings to have the publishing point start when the first client connects:

Users can now receive the content in the playlist by typing the URL of your publishing point in their player. The URL to a publishing point uses the following syntax: connection protocol://server_name/publishing_point_name (for example, mms://server1/my publishing point).

For more information about testing your streaming content, see Testing a stream.

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