Unable to seek in flv movie on IIS7

Question

I have 2 identical ASP.NET applications, one running on Windows Server 2003 with IIS6 and another running on Windows Server 2008 with IIS7.

The one on IIS6 runs perfectly, but on IIS7 I'm unable to seek while playing my video. They are both using the exact same HTTP-handler for streaming.

I'm using the JW player for Flash (v. 5.2) and Sorenson Squeeze 6 for converting the videos from .mpg to flv.
The FLV stream-handler is very (but not completely) similar to the one on this site

The one on IIS6: demo.orbicon.dk/wgv
The one on IIS7: kloakkort.nk-forsyning.dk/webgrafvideo/?filename=15050

I'm not allowed to post more than 1 hyperlink yet, so this will have to do :)

Answer 1

Hi user185608,

Seems like this is an issue with keyframe metadata. Keyframes are used in streaming servers to indicate the nearest position to which you can safely seek. Now, look at your files in the LongTail testing tool:

IIS 6: http://bit.ly/9cAM9X

IIS 7: http://bit.ly/cCoair

You'll notice that the IIS 6 file has several hundred keyframes, while the IIS 7 file does not. This means that the player is making a seek request every time you click in the controlbar, but the only keyframe that's available is at the start of the video, so it restarts.

This could be caused by two things: either the file doesn't have the keyframe metadata, or the streaming server isn't sending the keyframes along. If it's former, that can be fixed using FLVMDI. If it's the later, you'll need modify your server config / streaming script, and for that I defer to the IIS folk.

Best,

Zach

Developer, LongTail Video