The paragraph writen by Jim(Microsoft PM)

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The world, well at least the virtual world of Spaces, is abuzz about the new PowerToys – a collection of cool but unofficial and unsupported tools for jazzing up your blog.

 

The Windows Media Player PowerToy allows you to play audio and video on your Space, but I wanted to clear up some confusion about what it means to "stream" the media content.

 

You can’t upload media to your Space right now, so the PowerToy requires that you host the media content elsewhere. All you need is some place to store it so it can be accessed with a URL. Typically that URL starts with http:// which is the standard protocol used to access web pages. Windows Media Player does a great job of pulling down various media types and starting to play them even before they get completely downloaded to your machine. This isn’t true streaming, but it is often sufficient. Visitors to your Space start hearing sound fairly quickly.

 

True streaming lets your visitors do much more, though. In particular, they can jump to anywhere within the stream and start playing immediately. Check out my media part to the right. It plays an hour-long radio play – the famous Orson Welles 1938 War of the Worlds. (Far better entertainment than the current film, but that’s another story.) Once it connects, you can drag the slider anywhere along the timeline and immediately play any section. Initial play time is faster too.

 

How can you do this on your Space? There’s an easy part and a hard part. The easy part is that instead of using http:// you have to switch to the mms:// protocol.  The hard part is that you have to get your media hosted, not on some random website, but on a publishing point on a Windows Server that is set up for Media Streaming. Typical users can’t do this on their own. Many web sites aren’t even running a Windows server (yet!)

 

It seems like a huge barrier, but remember you don’t need a Windows Server. You get much of the benefit using any ordinary web server. If you do happen to be on Windows and you have access to a publishing point, you get this added advantage.

 

In the mean time, enjoy the radio play. Marvel at how the drama is constructed, how it unfolds carefully, insidiously, inexorably. No wonder people were jumping off buildings to escape the Martians when it first aired.