In the past this question has come up a lot; customers want to store video in SharePoint document libraries and have them streamed from the libraries much the same as an efficient streaming server. As cool as this would be in my experience its not really possible.

The standard libraries in MOSS do not support streaming per se but you can host WMV’s in the library just like any other file assuming the file type has been enabled.

The problem with most WMV’s and any video format is file size and hence they usually get stored on the file system. By default SharePoint sets the max upload file size at 50MB; this can be as large as 2GB (good luck). The best approach is to setup Windows Media Services which is part of Windows Server 2003/2008 and link to the stream from SharePoint as an ASX file. It is also possible to host Media Player as a webpart that points to the stream (or a standard WMV in a library) and renders the video inside the web page where Windows Media player is available on the local machine.

One technology I am pretty excited about is the FileStream object in SQL Server 2008; I think this could be a very interesting way for MOSS to manage large files like videos, ISO, VHD’s etc... However we may not see anything like this until 2009 with Office 14. Who knows. It would also be nice to see improved document streaming so for large documents I could start to see pages and could interact with a document without the whole document having to be fully downloaded.

BTW there are some niche solutions like Telestream that do work with SharePoint.

John Hodgson
HP

We use Groove a lot within our group at HP and we collaborate with Microsoft and some of our customers on Groove...nice to see some activity in the Groove space.

Proposal Tracker
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Proposal Tracker

Issues and Tasks Tracker
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Issues & Tasks Tracker 

Contact Tracker - released in 2007
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Contacts Tracker