Ensuring the stability of your streaming media system

To ensure that your streaming media system is stable, redundant, and capable of bearing the predicted load, keep the following in mind:

• If you plan to encode live content, it is recommended that you install the encoder and Windows Media Services on separate computers. Live encoding requires a large amount of processing capability; the additional load of serving client requests can adversely affect the quality of an encoded stream.
• Have multiple encoders encoding content so that publishing points on your Windows Media servers can switch to an alternate source in case there is a problem on the original encoder source.
• If you want to archive encoded content for later playback, do not use the encoder to create the archive file. Instead configure your Windows Media server to create an archived copy. This reduces the processing load on the encoding computer.
• Distribute content between numerous Windows Media servers. This enables the servers to provide content to different network segments, which reduces the number of routers that the stream must traverse in order to reach clients and improves the overall stream quality. In addition, extra servers provide redundancy and additional capacity if there are any server problems.
• If you intend to stream high volumes of Windows Media files, consider dedicating a separate NTFS volume for storing the files. An NTFS volume permits the use of access control list (ACL) checking on your content files as well as better file management capabilities.
• If you intend to stream high volumes of on-demand video content that is indexed to support fast-forward, skip, rewind, and pause capability, consider using the Advanced FF/RW feature to improve fast-forward and rewind ("trick mode") functionality for the video portion of encoded files. This feature stabilizes network bandwidth availability by smoothing the rate at which data is sent, and reduces potential server performance bottlenecks by reading less presentation data from the source content disk, all while delivering a seamless experience to clients. Copies of the original source content files must be created that support the different fast-forward or rewind speeds requested by clients.
• Consider using multicast streaming with unicast rollover. Multicast streaming can deliver content to any number of clients from a single stream. When additional clients connect through a multicast-enabled network, they do not require extra bandwidth from the server or place an additional load on the network, thus increasing the efficiency of the stream.

Note

• Advanced FF/RW is available only if Windows Media Services 9 Series is running on the following editions of the operating system: Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. If you are running Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition, this feature is not supported.

Related topics

• Streaming media system overview