hosting silverlight media with azure

Question

I'm considering hosting MP4s using Azure Blob storage. When azure returns a blob using a url does it include the accept-range header. Will silverlight be able to seek ahead using byte range requests on the Azure storage?

Answer 1

Yes, range requests work against blob storage. I've seen this scenario done (with wmv files), and things seem to work fine.

Answer 2

Instead of using Azure stroage you could use Microsofts Silverlight Streaming hosting.

It gives you 10 GB for free, see:

http://silverlight.live.com/

Answer 3

Microsoft Silverligth Streaming is closing down. Azure is the way forward.

Answer 4

Beware of cross-site scripting problems in (current) Azure Blob storage - you can call any media file from the native Silverlight media control, but I've seen a problem using (I think) the HttpRequest object - the developer wanted to have a look at the media file in order to see how big it was (they were doing something involving caching the file), and just making that request to the blob store (eg a different domain from the worker-role SL was hosted in) caused a cross-site scripting error.

Nasty

Answer 5

I don't think we got an answer for the first question: "When azure returns a blob using a url does it include the accept-range header?"

I think the answer is no. My question is why not and is there a way to add it? It seems that some apps -- Adobe Reader for example -- won't use ranges unless the original GET returns this header.