Technical information

54 Chapter 5 Troubleshooting and Technical Information
QTSS Publisher maintains a concurrent database of all the content it is hosting in
property list, or “plist”, files. The primary and most important of these is the “Links.plist”
file located in the QTSS Publisher folder. This file gets created when you publish your
first playlist or media file. The Web Pages.plist gets generated the first time you publish
a webpage to the web server in QTSS Publisher. These files keep track of all information
including which files have links. Any time you check a box in QTSS Publisher, an entry is
added to the plist file.
All media gets entries in these plist files: a playlist, a movie file, an MP3 file, whether
available for streaming or on demand. The information about everything that QTSS
Publisher makes publicly available is recorded in these two files. Any playlists created
by QTSS Publisher go into the /Library/Application Support/Apple/QTSS Publisher/
Playlists folder.
Any webpages you create in QTSS Publisher populate the Media directory and a
corresponding entry is stored in the “Web Pages.plist” which is discussed below.
A thumbnail image can be assigned to any movie (also called a Poster Image) for
display on a webpage. The thumbnail resides on the default web server folder with the
same name as the media file, appended with an “_i” at the end of the file name. When
you upload a poster image (Thumbnail), an entry goes into Poster Images.plist.
When files are available for download (via Fast Start), the media file is copied into the
default web server folder. If we specify a Fast Start file to also publish via the streaming
server, the first thing QTSS Publisher does for Fast Start movies is create a copy of the
movie that is optimized for fast-start and they get placed in the web server folder.
Instant-On movies get an alias to the original file placed in the QuickTimeStreaming
folder.
You can't embed a streaming URL in a webpage directly, so you have to make a
reference movie using QuickTime. This is a small file with a .mov extension which
essentially redirects the QuickTime player to the streaming (RTSP) URL. The reference
movie is created by QuickTime and is placed in qtmedia, (unless the default value has
been modified,) under the web server location (/Library/Webserver/Documents).
Playlists are setup for broadcast only, not for on-demand usage. Media is hosted from
the QTSS Publisher folder under Playlists. Every time you create a playlist, a subfolder is
created in the Playlists folder. These playlists are stored in .playlist files in the individual
subfolders of each playlist, which contain the names of all the files that are in the
playlist. There is also a .config file for details which are stored in the standard file format
documented at the Darwin Streaming Server site at developer.apple.com/darwin/
projects/streaming/.