Streaming Media Metafiles
Part Two: ASX files

There is an interesting quirk to .asx playlists. Windows Media Player will display the individual entry titles as a playlist if you are streaming the clips from a media server or if you’re playing from your local disk. It’s odd, however, that if you serve your media files from a Web server, the playlist will only display the title of the full presentation rather than the individual entries within it. Since all the title and abstract data is there in the .asx file, it shouldn’t matter where the media files are coming from. But it’s really no surprise that it does matter. There are lots of peculiarities like this you’ll discover when delivering media files from anything other than a streaming media server. Using streaming servers to deliver your content is really the best way to avoid a lot of caffeine-induced late-night insomnia, shortly before your deadline.

Helix Asxgen
If all you need is a bare-bones metafile that contains just a streaming server URL for the Windows Media Player to connect to, and you happen to be using the RealNetworks Helix Universal Server to deliver your Windows Media content, then you don’t need separate metafiles for all your video links. Like Ramgen, described in the first part of this series, Asxgen generates an .asx file on the fly so you don’t have to:

http://myserver.com:8080/asxgen/myvideofile.wmv

A complete reference to Windows Media .metafiles can be found at Microsoft's MSDN web site for WindowsMedia 9. There you'll find references to other useful ASX file elements, such as <EVENT> for inserting ads into your streams and <REPEAT> for having your content play again and again and again. In our next installment, we'll move on to Quicktime reference movies and hinting. Until then, I'm heading out to have a nap in that hammock.