I'm working on a Smooth Streaming project and using Windows Azure virtual machine (Windows Server 2008 R2) to store media contents. Streaming is working fine, but having some problem with publish point state. Publish point states are
Idle: Publish point created/Shut down
Starting: Publish point is connected
Started: It's streaming
Stopped: Streaming stopped
Please read the following two cases:
Case-1: Windows Azure virtual machine (Windows Server 2008 R2) I've IIS Media Services installed on this machine. I create publish point and start encoding using Microsoft Expression Encoder. Now the publish point is in Stopped state. I've selected to archive my streaming. So, publish point associates the archive path of the media contents (ismv, ism, ismc). But, if virtual machine restart manually or inadvertent, then all my publish points turned to idle state. In that case I lost the associated archive path and now can't do the on-demand streaming.
Case-2: My local computer Windows 8 Pro I do the same as case 1 but the difference is that after reboot/restart my publish point states become same it was. I mean idle publish point will be idle and stopped will be stopped. In that case I can do the on-demand streaming.
So, finally I don't want to stop my on-demand streaming after machine reboot. I want my publish points in same states.
Is there any way/utility which help me?
We had the same issue a few years ago. We solved this by serving the content from a webpage that would serve different urls for the content depending on the state of the publishing point, ie:
If the production was live, serve from the publishing point itself.
If the production was in on-demand, we should serve the video files from the archive folder directly (not the publishing point URL). This archive folder was in a web accessible directory that was generated via the RESTful API when creating the publishing point.
This was the only way we could ensure that the playback was consistent.