Greetings,

Please don't flame.. I know Windows Media Player isn't one of those favorite topics to speak to, but I'm in a real pickle here..

I've been hunting for answers, and have hit a brick wall.

I've recently discovered that WMP 11 on XP won't view MPEG2-TS streams from HTTP, yet its brother on Vista/Win 7 does (complete with shuttle support).

Our vendor brings ASI streams off of the satellite taking the Program Stream, and wrapping it up in a Transport Stream.

I've found Wowza which professes to stream them, but only "live" streams, and won't do Video On Demand for MPEG2-TS pre-recorded assets.....

I've found Live555 which will stream MPEG2-TS as video on demand, which VLC loves, but WMP refuses to interface with (Wireshark sees WMP call the RTSP 'DESCRIBE', which gets the SDP file, and then turns back around and issues an HTTP style "GET filename.ts HTTP 1.0" - which makes me believe it's falling back to "HTTP over RTSP" which isn't supported in Live555).

DarwinStreamingServer - MP4 / .MOV only.

Windows Media Streaming Server - (For XP, since it's now part of WMP in Vista/7) only supports ASF/WMV etc.

So here I sit, at the gap between technologies and a BOATLOAD of MPEG2-TS files being ingested daily, and the powers-that-be in the company have issued a technological edict that the solution I provide to stream and view these files MUST BE WMP.

So my questions:
1) Do any of you gurus out there know of any streaming server (Not hardware based if possible) that can interface properly with Windows Media Player on an RTSP basis (XDLNA etc is not useful to me).

2) Will the full blown QuicktimeStreamingServer handle MPEG2-TS streaming to WMP (before I go buy an OSX server to try it myself)?

3) Failing either of those, I may be able to push WMP out of the picture if any of you gurus out there know of an embeddable streaming CLIENT that can used/embedded within a web page that either supports vanilla RTSP over TCP/UDP, or http:// streaming and can render MPEG2-TS streams without a client install required (like VLC does if you want to use jVLC, or MPlayer's plugin).

Sorry if I ramble, it's been a bit of a hectic week.

Thanks in advance,

Pen