Server-Side Playlists

You can use a server-side playlist to identify the media items (and the timing behavior of those items) that the server can stream to a client. The client can request a specific playlist, or the server can automatically send a playlist when a client connects.

Typically, a playlist is contained in a file, but you can specify other sources. The server uses a playlist parser plug-in to read the playlist and create a playlist object in memory. The playlist object employs a subset of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to identify, for the server, the content to be streamed to the client.

The following are some of the advantages of using a playlist:

• Because the server seamlessly switches between the media files in a playlist, you can customize the viewer experience by combining multiple digital media files into what will appear to the end user to be a single content stream. Furthermore, this minimizes bandwidth spikes by decreasing the number of times that clients must connect to retrieve content.

• You can wrap content requested by the client with additional media files that must be viewed whenever a client connects to a broadcast.

• You can use the server object to specify dynamically what media files to stream. In other words, you can edit the playlist even while a client is viewing a stream identified by the playlist.

• You can use playlist attributes to send additional information about the content to the client. For more information, see Playlist Attributes.

The following sections introduce server side-playlists. For more detailed information, see Programming Playlists and Playlist Reference.

See Also

Concepts

SDK Architecture