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.
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Description |
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Discusses the object created in memory for an active playlist. |
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Discusses the XML syntax and structure of a server-side playlist. |