Best Practices

The following are best practices from this chapter:

• For faster performance on a Windows Media Services system, place the system and application files on one hard drive set, and place the data files stored on a separate hard drive set.

• Use the Windows Media Load Simulator to test the real-time performance capabilities of a Windows Media Services system.

• To run multicast broadcasting, a Windows Media Services system needs to run the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2008.

• Use standard DNS characters (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, and the minus sign) for publishing point names so that when you need to access the published access, you can access it over the Internet.

• If you are publishing a broadcast to dozens of users over a network infrastructure that supports multicast broadcasting, use the Multicast function of Windows Media Services to minimize system bandwidth demands.

• Use the loop function in the video playback options if the video you are publishing should run continuously, such as in public kiosks or advertising systems.

• Combine files for publishing by using the playlist function in the Windows Media Services MMC Publishing Point Configuration option.

• Download Windows Media Encoder to access freely available file capture and conversion tools.

• Run Windows Media Encoder on a system with as much RAM, processing speed, and disk space as possible. When a system is underpowered, a video capture or conversion might be forced to drop frames and ultimately lower the quality of the video.

• When capturing content using Windows Media Encoder, ensure that the microphone has been turned on to properly capture audio content because the microphone is normally disabled by default.

• Select a bit rate for capture and conversion that matches the needs of the users. Although the highest quality might be preferable, the bandwidth demands of multiple users accessing the content at high quality might saturate the available network bandwidth.