CDN caching of whole container with smooth streaming

Question

Is is possible to force a container to cache all blobs within it as soon as one of its blobs is accessed?

My question is relevant using the "Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs Uploader" (http://blog.smarx.com/posts/smooth-streaming-with-windows-azure-blobs-and-cdn).

After doing some tests, it seems to me that CDN caches only the blobs (files) when every single blob is accessed, and not all blobs in the container.

This means, with Smooth Streaming, that because of the latency and low bandwidth during the first access of the video, Smooth Streaming will choose a low bitrate stream, and the higher bitrate streams may never be cached at the CDN edge server because they are never accessed; or if we are lucky it requires many replays of the video before all streams are cached. This is a huge problem with videos not frequently accessed.

Are there any solutions to this, so that all streams are available at the first or second play of the Smooth Streaming video?

regards,
Peter
Demo HD video at: http://cdn.skov.com/en-skov-presentation2012/Graph.html

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Peter :-)

Answer 1

Currently this is not supported. But you can submit a feature request on http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting.

Answer 2

Thanks, I have suggested the feature.

If I send a HTTP HEAD instead of a HTTP GET for a blob, will that trigger a the start of the caching of that blob at the CDN edge server?

If so, we could loop through all streaming chuncks before starting the playing of the video, to get them cached.

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Peter :-)

Answer 3

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think a HEAD request will download the complete blob to CDN nodes. It will only download the blob properties.