Note that if you really want to use a wmv file I think you can embed on in the page using the standard html content feature and using the media toolbar item in the editor to upload it. But I recommend using a format that is more compatible. Our audio and video features are built on jplayer so they are not going to use that format.

Hi,

Yes Windows Media format is very efficient but unfortunately proprietary to windows. 

The thing to understand is that mojoPortal is not involved in processing video requests. All mojoportal does is deliver html to the web browser and that html may have links to video or javascript video players that link to video. When a user clicks the link it is the web server (ie IIS) that delivers the video file or stream without any processing or influence from mojoPortal. We do provide some ways to upload the files but we don't limit that either in terms of file size it is all done by configuration in terms of what IIS will allow.

Beyond configuration the limits are whatever the machine and bandwidth are able to handle.

Video files are large and serving a lot of large files to a lot of simultaneous users adds up quickly to a heavy load.

Whenever possible I recommend off load the serving of the video to the infrastructure of free services such as youtube and just embed the youtube video in the web page so it plays on your site pages like I did on this page for example.

When you upload a video to youtube they convert it to a variety of formats to support different devices and different levels of bandwidth. For youtube you should upload the highest quality file you can create and not worry too much about compression to make the file smaller as that also can degrade the quality. Let them worry about compressing it and optimizing it.

For self hosted video files it definitely makes a difference about the tools used, some encoding tools do work better than others as far as compressing the video and audio.

Hope that helps,

Joe

Hi,

The thing to understand is that you cannot use file system permissions to protect the files. File system permissions are for Windows user accounts, web visitors are not logged into windows even if they are logged into mojoPortal.

The IIS web site runs in the context of a windows user that is the identity on the application pool and all web requests by all users whether authenticated or not are running as the same windows user. To serve the files at all this windows user must have read permission on the files.

To protect video files in a specific folder in a web site would require custom development. One could implement a custom http module and plug it in via web.config. As I said before generally static files are served directly by IIS without and involvement from mojoPortal or asp.net code. However it is technically possible to make an http module that intervenes in requests for file in a specific folder, check the users role cookie and if not in a granted role the http module could return a 404 or 401 status code to prevent IIS from completing the request and serving the file. Such a custom http module could not be based on page view roles since the request for the video file has not page id in the url and nothing to tie the file to a page in the site. It could only check the role cookie efficiently, one would not want to do database lookups in such a module for example. So the allowed roles would need to be hard coded somewhere or in a config settings and the module would inspect all requests and if the url for the request has the folder that you want to protect then you would check the role cookie and if the user is not in the role return the status code to prevent access otherwise do nothing and let IIS serve the file. http modules run for every single request so they need to be very efficient in figuring out if the current request is one it cares about or not and in any other processing they do.

Hope that helps,

Joe

Hi Ken,

That should work, it slipped my mind that there is a simple web.config way to protect a folder by site roles, I'm pretty sure that all that tool does is make the web.cofig files and settings for you.

Best,

Joe

Hi Ken,

Looking at your screen shot there is nothing in mojoPortal and nothing currently planned to control access to static files to that degree.

You can protect the static files in a given folder by adding a web.config file in the folder and configuring authorization rules. ie you could ahve a folder at /Data/Sites/1/media/premvideos

​and you could put a web.config file in that folder something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <security>
         <authorization>
            <remove users="*" roles="" verbs="" />
            <add accessType="Allow" users="" roles="premiumrole" />
         </authorization>
      </security>
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

where premiumrole is a custom role in mojoPortal. So you could secure the video page in mojoPortal with that role and you could tell IIS to protect the folder containing the video files using a custom Web.config file in that folder.

Note that it is IIS not mojoPortal that protects the files.

I "think" WSAT tool just provides a UI that creates/edits those Web.config files and settings.

One could build their own UI that could also do that but it isn't something I plan to do, so with mojoPortal you would either have to create and manage those files and settings manually or use an external tool if there is one that does it.

Many thanks for the beers! Much appreciated.

Cheers,

Joe