Windows Media Playback in a Web Page

Let's face it, watching video on the computer — even at 300kbps — is still an experience only a hard core techie could love. It isn't going to beat out television. Where things get interesting is when the video gets combined with other information or applications that enhance or allow us to manipulate the video.

In this article, I'm going to show you how to include Windows Media video in your Web pages. This is your first step to becoming an Interactive TV programmer.

Putting Video Online

Before you start creating interactive video on the Web you need a place to host your video. One thing that all articles seem to neglect is how the average person gets access to a video server at a reasonable price.

If you have a copy of Windows Media 2000 Server you can install Windows Media Services yourself and you can run all your testing locally. But what if you're the average user with a single computer and slow Internet access? What you need is someone else to host your video at a price that isn't going to tax your depleted tech stock portfolio.

Its called Playstream

You can get a free site for 15 days and then rates are as low as $4.99/month after that. I swear, I'm not associated with them. They provide online statistics and allow you to grow to be as big as you want to be. If you come up with some content that is particularly compelling then they can even set up a pay-per-view service. Once you get your video online your ready to become an ITV programmer.

Launching the Player

Video files for Windows Media consist of two files. The main video file (.ASF) and a "pointer" file (.ASX or .WVX) that you use to point to the video server. For those of you who are familiar with Real Video the relationship is the same as the Real Video (.RM) to the RAM file.

The ASX and the WVX files are the exact same thing and contain the same information. WVX is simply what Microsoft decided to call the ASX file in Windows Media 7. To ensure backward compatibility I would continue to us ASX. All code in this article will refer to ASX files.

	Pointer File	Media File
Windows Media	asx or .wvx	.asf, wmv, wma
Real Media	.ram	.rm, ra

The simplest way to get video into your Web page is to place a link to the "pointer" file in your page. The pointer file, either .wvx or .asx, resides on your Web server with the HTML, not on the streaming server.

This link will appear exactly like any other link on the page, but instead of pointing to a new Web page it points to an ASX file. Once clicked on the browser is smart enough to launch the Windows Media Player as a stand-alone application and play the video.

Simple ASX Files

First, let's take a look at a simple ASX file that will serve to launch your video. In the next section I will discuss the XML-based language of the ASX file and show how it can control the video file.

Place this in your HTML:
<A HREF=" yourfile.asx">Link to Streaming Content</A>

Here is the file yourfile.asx. This should go in the same directory as the HTML file that points to it. Create it in Notepad or your HTML editing program and save it as a normal text file with the .asx extension.

<ASX version = "3.0">
  <ENTRY>
    <REF HREF =
    "mms://win.playstream.com/jrule/video/sample.asf" />
  </ENTRY>
</ASX>

It's that simple. Now remember this doesn't embed the video in the page; it launches the standalone player. I'll show you how to embed the video later on.

Complex ASX Files - Page 2