Problem in displaying the movie file in silverlight

Question

I am developing a portal for online theatre system. I will show the movie in online website daily in shows(like 6-10 PM Shows). I am using Silverlight to display the video in web application. I am holding my movie file in Windows Azure Blob. I am having a problem displaying the movie file.

Consider if ay user login to web system @6 The movie will show from starting.. If the user login to the system @7 the movie should start whats going now in the screen for other user not from the begining of the movie.

How can I achieve tis.

Answer 1

You could use IIS / Media Services 3.0 -> Live smooth streaming. http://www.iis.net/download/LiveSmoothStreaming

However this probably doesn't suit you if you are using Azure, because you probably don't have a server on which to install IIS 7.0 / media services. And smooth streaming usually requires you pre-encode the video to its format (using Expression Encoder), thus making your blob redundant.

I have read that the Azure team have recognised the need for smooth streaming, but it isn't currently available.

If doing it without a media server, eg by serving up a wmv as simply a file, you could just try setting the MediaElement.Position property to start at the 'current' time you want. However without doing some sort of progressive download, this will require the end user to download the whole movie which isn't good for them or you. This is a big advantage of using streaming, as it only downloads what it needs and wouldn't stream the movie prior to the 'Position' that you set.