Aurea Social Video Stream 5.0 Integration with Kontiki
Overview
Many organizations who want to use Video Stream to truly make video “social” have already made substantial investments in video streaming infrastructure.
One of the popular enterprise-class video storage and streaming technologies that Newsgator customers are using is Kontiki.
When integrated with Kontiki, Video Stream continues to encode the uploaded video files but leverages the storage and streaming infrastructure of Kontiki. Kontiki’s peer-based file sharing mechanism is ideal for geographically disparate environments as it minimizes load on the WAN by streaming from a copy local to a region or office.
This guide describes how to enable Kontiki as the storage and streaming mechanism for Video Stream. For the end-user, the Video Stream experience is the same as using the Video Stream native option.
For the administrator, the Kontiki integration capability deploys as a SharePoint feature.
Configuring Video Stream to support Kontiki
This section outlines the steps to enable and disable the Kontiki Integration feature.
Prerequisites
The Kontiki Integration feature requires Aurea Social5.0 and Aurea Social Video Stream 5.0. These should be installed and configured before deploying the Kontiki Integration feature.
Since Kontiki handles the streaming, configuration steps or entries related to the streaming server in the Aurea Social installer or the Video Stream Additional Components installer can be ignored. IIS and the Smooth Streaming Extensions for IIS is not required.
The Kontiki Integration uses the Microsoft Expression Encoder by default and so following the steps and filling entries related to streaming is critical. As of 3.0.2, you can use the free version of the Expression Encoder and it encodes to VC1.
If you have licenses to the Pro version, you can encode videos to H264 instead but the encoding service needs to be configured accordingly by changing the UseH264 parameter to “True”:
Other encoders can be substituted programmatically. See the Newsgator Aurea Social Video Stream 5.0 Third-party Video Solution Integration Guide for more details on how to integrate other encoders.
The Kontiki Integration feature requires the Kontiki client to be installed on any machine that views videos. If the Kontiki client is not installed on the user’s machines they cannot view videos.
Make sure you have a Kontiki user account with connector access allowing you to use the Kontiki publishing web service endpoint.
Below are the steps:
Step 1 – Configure SharePoint to trust the digicert root certificate used by the Kontiki publisher web service
Integration with Kontiki is done through a web service protected by SSL. The root certificate used by Kontiki must be trusted by your SharePoint installation.
The root certificate that should be trusted by your SharePoint installation is the “DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA”. You can get the certificate from https://www.digicert.com/digicert-root-certificates.htm. Once you have a copy of the certificate on the machine you can proceed with telling SharePoint to trust this certificate.
- Go to Central Administration > Security > Manage Trust.
- Click on New.
- Click on the Browse option of the Root Authority Certificate field.
- Select the file that contains the copy of the certificate.
Step 2 - Installing the Kontiki solution file
The Kontiki integration is contained in the NewsGator.VideoStream.KontikiIntegration.wsp file. The Kontiki solution is not loaded by any of the NewsGator installers so this needs to be done manually. You can use STSADM to load this solution file into your SharePoint installation.
Here is an example of the STSADM command that loads the solution file into SharePoint:
Once the solution has been loaded into your environment you can proceed to Central Administration > System Settings > Manage farm features and deploy it.
Step 3 - Activating the Kontiki Farm feature
Once deployed, a new Farm level feature is available. This feature is called NewsGator VideoStream Integration With Kontiki (Farm). Activating this feature turns on Kontiki integration. vgv
The VideoStream module now uses Kontiki to store and stream videos.
After enabling the feature you should restart IIS and the SharePoint Timer service on all the servers in the farm.
Step 4 - Configuring Kontiki integration
Once the solution file is deployed and the farm level feature is activated a new Kontiki option appears on the manage page for the VideoStream module.
This option takes you to a Kontiki properties page where you can configure the connection with the Kontiki Publishing web service.
Fields on the properties page:
- Time Zone Code: The time zone code of the server that hosts the “NewsGator VideoStream Management” timer job. That job uploads videos to Kontiki.
- Kontiki Publisher Web Service URL: The URL to the Kontiki publisher web service.
- Kontiki User Account: Your user account WITH CONNECTOR ACCESS to the Kontiki Publisher web service.
- Kontiki Password: Your password to get access to the Kontiki Publisher web service.
- Time in milliseconds the Kontiki Publisher Service waits for an upload to complete (-1 = waits for ever): The time in milliseconds the connection to the Publisher web service is kept alive while an upload is happening. If you want the connection to stay alive forever and never time out set it to -1.
- Kontiki Client Port Number: The port number the Kontiki clients are configured to listen on in your environment.
Switching back to Video Stream native mode from Kontiki Integration mode
To switch back to Video Stream native mode, deactivate the NewsGator VideoStream Integration With Kontiki (Farm) in Central Administration/Manage Farm features. After that, install the streaming server as described above.