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I was checking out this MSDN post describing multimedia redirection because it's high time we let our users view training videos through our app and not just email them a link.

Windows Media Player uses the Media Foundation infrastructure to play back content such as WMA, WMV, MP3, DivX, etc., and DirectShow for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, etc. In addition, most streaming media content is played back through the Format SDK (FSDK). Most audio and video content played back through Windows Media Player will be redirected using this scheme as long as the client has the decoder to decode the content.

The only problem is we're getting a little sick of encoding them in two formats when most folks can just use webm nowadays. So, if I have a link to a movie that Internet Explorer plays (Streaming HTML5 video using FlowPlayer) and IE chooses to play the webm file, even though I've got an MP4 handy (which I think the blog post says ought to work through multimedia redirection) will the webm be redirected or will we get more angry calls from sysadmins?

HopelessN00b
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Peter Turner
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You will get angry call. You need to use Windows Media Player, some reference below;

If your video are in flash format, then Flash content can be redirected, but with Citrix in ICA.

Both way work as it, the receiver send the raw content to the locally installed application, thats why both technology (with RDP or ICA) need the application locally to decode the raw data. Intensive video will not hurt your CPU that way but can hurt your WAN link. So it's the unofficial drawback. In my test I seen 6mbps/s burst for the WAN, so it's to test out correctly before allowing it.

Windows Media Player uses the Media Foundation infrastructure to play back content such as WMA, WMV, MP3, DivX, etc., and DirectShow for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, etc. In addition, most streaming media content is played back through the Format SDK (FSDK). Most audio and video content played back through Windows Media Player will be redirected using this scheme as long as the client has the decoder to decode the content. This includes content that goes through Media Foundation as well as DirectShow. In addition, content that is streamed can also be redirected. If the decoders are not present on the client then content will be rendered on the server using the server’s CPU/GPU resources (host side rendering). The compressed bitmaps and audio (see the blog post What’s New in Remote Audio for Windows 7?) would then be sent efficiently over the network to the client. from there

yagmoth555
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  • Shoot, we just got away from using the flash version of Flowplayer! In any event, I don't think I could use detect whether someone connected to my website using RDP or Citrix the way I can in my application. Do you know what sort of container IE uses to play back video, I figured it just was Windows Media Player in some way. – Peter Turner Jan 13 '15 at 17:09
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    I don't think natively it's WMP. On the other hand I seen that if you control the website you can enable WMP control on IE; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd564581(v=vs.85).aspx – yagmoth555 Jan 13 '15 at 17:36