Monthly Archives: October 2012

Display WMV And MP4 Videos Using The SharePoint 2010 Media Web Part

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The SharePoint 2010 Media Web Part is stored in the Media and Content category and can be used to display videos within a SharePoint page.  The web part uses Silverlight and supports all the formats supported by Silverlight including WMV and H264.  A full list of supported media formats is available here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189080(VS.95).aspx

The web part can display videos held within a SharePoint library, stored on a server, or from an http address.  In this post I’m going to cover displaying videos from an http address using IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 R2.

The first step is to create a folder on the web server to hold the videos.  Once you’ve done this open IIS Manager, expand the web site you wish to use and create an application to host the media content.  Enter an alias and point the application at the folder holding the videos.

By default IIS has the MIME type for WMV, but the MIME type for MP4 needs to be added.  Click on the application you just created, then open MIME types, listed under IIS,  in the middle pane.  Click Add under actions, enter .mp4 in file name extension and video/mpeg in MIME Type.

Copy your videos to the folder you created on the web server and add a Media web part to a SharePoint page.  Click on the web part to view the configuration options in the ribbon.  Click on Change Media and choose From Address.  In the address box enter the path to the video, e.g. http://webserver/Media/testvideo.mp4 or http://webserver/Media/testvideo.wmv.  When you click play your video will buffer, then begin to play.

Configure Dell DRAC For OOB In System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) has the ability to communicate with the Dell DRAC.  This enables you to do things such as power on, reset, or power off a host server using the DRAC from the SCVMM console.

I’ve successfully configured SCVMM to communicate with the DRAC 5 and iDRAC 6.  On the DRAC 5 I had to enable IPMI, which is the communication protocol used by SCVMM to communicate with the DRAC.  On the DRAC 5 IPMI is enabled by clicking on Remote Access, followed by the Configuration tab and then Network.  At the bottom of the screen is the option to enable IPMI over LAN.  Click Apply Changes to save your changes.  Check that the user account you wish to use has the IPMI LAN privilege by clicking on the Users tab, next to Network.

On the iDRAC 6, IPMI is enabled by clicking on iDRAC Settings, the Network/Security tab, then Network.  At the bottom of the screen is the option to enable IPMI over LAN.  Click Apply Changes to save your changes.  Check that the user account you wish to use has the IPMI LAN privilege by clicking on the Users tab, next to Network.

To configure SCVMM to use the DRAC, open the SCVMM console and navigate to Fabric.  Right-click on the host and choose properties.  Notice that in the screenshot below the Reset and Power Off options are unavailable as the DRAC hasn’t been configured to work with SCVMM.

Click on Hardware and scroll to the Advanced section at the bottom of the properties page.  Tick the box “This physical machine is configured for OOB management with the following settings”.  Enter the IP address of the DRAC into the BMC address box.  Click Browse next to Run As account.  Click Create Run As Account and register the DRAC account you wish to use.  Untick the Validate domain credentials box if you’re using a DRAC user account.  Once you’ve entered the Run As account click OK.

If you click on the host properties, you will now see that the Reset and Power Off options are available for this host.

Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer

Whilst on a SharePoint server, I tried to view a list in Windows Explorer, but I was confronted with the error “Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer”.  This is because out of the box, Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t include the WebClient service, which is required to work with WebDAV.  To install the service, simply install the Desktop Experience feature on the server.

 

Improve WebDAV Performance On Windows 7

Copying items to a SharePoint list with Windows Explorer uses WebDAV.  I found the copy process was extremely slow on my PC; about 300MB of Word documents were going to take over night to copy to the server.  I was able to reduce this time to less than 30 minutes by turning off “Automatically detect settings” in Internet Explorer internet options.