Background
We're doing a proof-of-concept around Sharepoint 2007. It's installed using VMWare on Windows Server 2008 64-bit. This covers the whole farm which is 2 front-end boxes, one database box and one index server box.
Problem
We're trying to use the PKS podcast kit from Codeplex. We run into two problems: video vs search. One site we setup has the search working but the video doesn't while another site the video works but not the search (you can't search the video streams).
TweedleDee
Where video works, we get the thumbnail, the duration, and streaming using the silverlight player. When you try to search using the podcasters scope, you get zero search results regardless of the query string. When you search using the podcast scope you get no results and an error message on result page: "Property doesn't exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings." The search scopes are a part of the PKS solution so they weren't a custom configuration choice of ours. In the administration setup for search you are supposed to map fields from the target content type to equivalent ones for the search engine except there are two fields that are missing from the list of search fields, ows_Total_x0020_Downloads(Decimal) and ows_ContentType(Text).
Here is one of the mappings that we're trying to setup:
- Property name: Downloads
- Type: Decimal
- Mappings: ows_Total_x0020_Downloads(Decimal)
- Use in scopes: false
This comes up again where we are supposed to define a new search scope, for Property Query select 'ListContentType' where 'ListContentType' isn't a choice.
TweedleDum
Another site we setup to exercise the podcasting kit, we upload videos but they do not get any thumbnails or duration information and when you select a video the player never comes up. The list of videos shows the entries for everything that was uploaded and when you search for a title or a podcaster the search returns what you would expect.
Disclosure
The FAQ for PKS does mention that it has not been tested on 2008 64-bit. Will we have to wait for them to find an answer or is there a better choice we've overlooked?
[EDIT]
We're looking for a solution that allows videos to be searchable from SharePoint. We could create a SharePoint list that contains a field for the URL to a video server. Uploading the video to one site and then manually creating an entry for the URL in a second site may be too high a barrier. The end user won't bother and we don't want to make more work for the support team by asking them to retroactively creating those links.