TABLE OF CONTENTS As you gain experience with Windows Media Series 9, you'll discover a wealth of features that let you create and manage a cutting-edge streaming media communications system. You can customize the user experience by adding webpages embedded within the player interface or manage the entire interface with skins and borders. As your streaming media delivery system becomes more complex, you can test their ability to deliver streams reliably with advanced testing techniques. And you can analyze your traffic patterns via logs generated by Windows Media Server. By the end of this chapter, you will:
Understand the principles behind player customization
Know the options for testing performance with the Windows Media Load Simulator
Learn how to evaluate streaming traffic with server logs
In Chapter 8, Delivering Windows Media to Your Audience, you learned that you don't have to limit the end user experience of your audio or video to the standalone Windows Media Player. The section "Embedding Playback in a Webpage" described how to place player objects, such as the video window and Play/Pause/Stop controls, in an HTML page. In this section, you'll explore three other methods for customizing the user experience: HTMLview, skins, and borders.
Just as you embed player objects in an HTML page using the OBJECT tag, you embed HTML pages within the Windows Media Player interface with the HTMLView parameter of the Windows Media announcement or metafile, which has the .asx extension. See Figure 12-1 for an example.
