Release Notes for Media Services Preview

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This post contains release notes for the Windows Azure Media Services Preview, June 2012. The release notes summarize known issues in the current release. To report other issues or ask questions of the Media Services team, please post in this forum.

The issues are grouped into two categories in the following tables:

• Media Services General issues
• Media Services SDK for .NET Issues

For more information, see Media Services Documentation on MSDN.

Media Services General Issues

ID	Issue	Description
MS1	If you delete Media Services objects (such as assets, tasks, or jobs) by using your Windows Azure Storage account rather than by using Media Services, an orphaned record is left in Media Services.	When you create Media Services objects, associated metadata records are also created. If you delete a Media Services object programmatically in Media Services, it works as expected. However if you use your Storage account to delete a Media Services object (such as an asset), the associated Media Services record is not deleted, which leaves an orphaned record. For the current release, the best workaround is to use Media Services to delete Media Services objects.
MS2	Several common HTTP headers are not provided in the REST API.	If you develop Media Services applications using the REST API, you find that some common HTTP header fields (including CLIENT-REQUEST-ID, REQUEST-ID, and RETURN-CLIENT-REQUEST-ID) are not supported. The headers will be added in an updated Preview release.
MS3	During the Media Services account setup process, if you use the provided Powershell scripts and call the method Update-MediaServicesStorageAccountKey, you get no response.	No response on this method indicates success in updating your Media Services account key. If the method fails, there will be an exception.
MS4	When you try to create a locator URL to an asset container that has been deleted, a null reference exception is returned.	If you create an asset, then delete it, and then a locator is created to the base asset container, Media Services does not return a detailed exception and error message. Instead it returns a System.NullReferenceException.
MS5	When you pass a null value for the configuration parameter to a task, the resulting job stops responding.	If you pass a null value for the configuration parameter to a new task, when you submit the processing job, it stops responding and does not return an exception. This is due to an issue in the Media Services scheduler.
MS6	When you create a task with a named output asset, the output asset name does not persist after job completion.	After you run a job that contains a task with a named output asset, your output asset  name does not persist and the output asset has the name "JobOutputAsset(0)".  This occurs for both REST API and Media Services SDK for .NET developers.

Media Services SDK for .NET Issues

ID	Issue	Description
SDK1	Media Services objects in the SDK cannot be serialized and as a result do not work with Windows Azure Caching.	If you try to serialize the SDK AssetCollection object to add it to Azure Caching, an exception is thrown.
SDK2	If you try to create a media processor for a task and you query the MediaProcessors collection using an invalid media processor string, an exception is returned.	When you create a processing task in Media Services, you typically create a media processor using one of the several available processors (for example, the Windows Azure Media Encoder). However, if you specify an invalid processor name, a general InvalidOperationException is thrown, and there is not a detailed description of the cause.
SDK3	When you create an access policy, you cannot set the duration parameter to TimeSpan.MaxValue.	If you set the duration parameter on an access policy to TimeSpan.MaxValue, Media Services throws a System.Overflow exception. However, this is only for very large date values. If you set values that create access policies with durations of days, years, or even hundreds of years, the exception does not occur.
SDK4	Job templates and Task templates are not supported in the Preview release of Media Services SDK for .NET.	JobTemplate and TaskTemplate are supported entities in Media Services as described in the documentation. You can access these entities using the REST API. However, these objects are not supported in the Media Services SDK Preview for .NET release. Support will be available in an upcoming release.
SDK5	Asset creation methods (such as Assets.Create and Assets.CreateFromDirectory) do not encrypt the asset by default.	By default, asset creation methods in the Media Services SDK should create an asset that is encrypted for storage. This is described in the Media Services documentation on MSDN.  However, in the current Media Services Preview release, if you don't specify a storage encryption option when creating an asset (such as AssetCreationOptions.StorageEncrypted), the asset will be sent in the clear by default (this is equivalent to AssetCreationOptions.None).  When you want to encrypt assets for storage, the best workaround is to explicitly set the storage encryption option:  _context.Assets.Create(myAssetFilePath, AssetCreationOptions.StorageEncrypted).