Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Windows Server 2003 SP1 IMPROVES Windows Media 9 Services:

For anyone that cares about my poor humble pet product, Windows Media 9 Services, you should know and remind folks that Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 substantially updates Windows Media 9 Series including x64 support for 40% great scalability, and Broadcast auto-start which automatically restarts broadcastsing live streams after a server has crashed and restarted.  (While this may not be important to you, this is a REALLY big improvement for Windows Media mavens.)

Note that the product DIFFERS depending on what version of Windows Server 2003 you own.  Only Enterprise Edition has Advanced Fast Start, Cache/Proxy Server functionality, and Fast Recovery, for example.  (Among other features)  For a breakdown of what Standard Edition has versus Enterprise Edition, please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/server/version.aspx.

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Advanced Fast Start
Fast Start delivers an instant-on playback experience by eliminating buffering time. When a viewer connects to a stream, the first few seconds of data are sent using the maximum available bandwidth, so playback can begin as soon as possible. Advanced Fast Start adds to these existing Fast Start capabilities by allowing Windows Media Player to begin playing content as soon as its buffer receives a minimum amount of data, which further reduces the amount of time a user must wait to begin receiving the stream.

Play While Archiving
Prior to this update of Windows Media Services, broadcast content could be archived to a file, but the archived content could not be made available for on-demand requests or rebroadcast until archiving was finished. In this version, archived files can be made available for on-demand requests or rebroadcast even before the broadcast is finished being archived.

Advanced FF/RW
Improved fast-forward and rewind ("trick mode") functionality for the video portion of content stabilizes network bandwidth availability by utilizing separate files for each FF/RW speed. This results in a fixed bandwidth requirement per client, regardless of playback speed, and greatly smoothes the FF/RW experience. Potential server performance bottlenecks are reduced because the server must read less presentation data from the source content disk, while delivering a seamless experience to clients.

Broadcast AutoStart
You no longer need to manually restart broadcast publishing points in the event of an interruption, such as a power failure. You can now configure your broadcast publishing points to begin running again automatically whenever the Windows Media server starts, so viewers experience less disruption when viewing streaming content.

Absolute Playlist Time
Absolute Playlist Time adds the playlist timing value wallclock. You can use the wallclock value to automate broadcast schedules by assigning real-world clock values in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to attributes in server-side playlists.

Encoder Failover URL Modifiers
If the primary encoder fails or is stopped, you can configure Windows Media Services to pull content from an alternate encoder or other content source after a specified period of time by using URL modifiers in the path to the primary encoder. Using redundant encoders or other alternate content sources increases the reliability of the source content.

Additional Windows Server System Platform Support (x64)
Windows Media Services is available as a component in x64-based versions of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system. These x64-based computers run 64-bit processors with an extended x86 instruction set, such as the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) AMD64 and Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) processor lines. Using a 64-bit version of Windows Media Services can result in scalability increases of over 40% compared to the 32-bit version running on the same hardware.
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Details on the changes made are available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/server.aspx