Vishal Sood

Smooth Streaming Plugin for Flash

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:17:00 GMT

We announced a release of a final version of Smooth Streaming Plugin for Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). Please read Cenk's blog post for details.

Here is a quick blurb from Cenk's post:

We are pleased to announce that Windows Azure Media Services team released a RTW version of Microsoft Smooth Streaming plugin for OSMF. Using Smooth Streaming OSMF plugin, you can add Smooth Streaming capabilities to existing OSMF and Strobe Media Playback players and furthermore build rich media experiences for Adobe Flash Player endpoints using the same back-end infrastructure you use today to target Smooth Streaming playback to other devices like Win8 store apps, browser and so on.

Shipped: Smooth Streaming Client SDK Beta 1 Refresh for Windows 8 Release Preview

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 06:20:33 GMT

I hope you have already seen the blog post from our team announcing the Smooth Streaming release to accompany Windows 8 Release Preview here. As Cenk blogs, we are very excited about this release and hope you all will build compelling rich media experiences that make use of Smooth Streaming in Metro Applications for Windows 8.

If you are using the client SDK and the player framework, do drop in a comment and provide a reference to your application. Also, we really appreciate any feedback we receive and the team would love to hear from you.

Here is an excerpt from the blog post to get you started:

The initial release notes are available through IIS Learn Center and can be found here.

For get started with this new SDK, you can download the Smooth Streaming Client for Windows 8 (Beta) from the Visual Studio Gallery and Player Framework from CodePlex.

Step by steps instructions for building a basic HTML5 Smooth Streaming Windows 8 Metro app can be found here.

For Smooth Streaming PlayReady protected content support, you need “PlayReady Client SDK for Metro Style Apps” and corresponding code blocks which can be downloaded from here.

Roku releases support for Smooth Streaming

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:50:49 GMT

At NAB 2012 in April, we announced an initial list of partners that licensed Smooth Streaming Client Porting Kit (link). Today, Roku announced that the support for Smooth Streaming is publicly available for Roku 2, Roku LT and Roku HD devices with version Roku software version 4.7. This update will be pushed to these devices in next 48 hours. You can get more details on their blog.

Congratulations to the team at Roku for this release. We are very excited to see the release.

Writing a simple Metro app for Windows 8 that consumes Smooth Streaming

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:35:00 GMT

Cenk on the media team blogged about how to create a simple Metro app using standard video element that can consume Smooth Streaming content. You can check it out here.

Here is a short intro:

“In this post I'll cover how to build a basic HTML5 Metro Style Smooth Streaming Player using the IIS Smooth Streaming Client SDK Beta for Metro Style Apps. This basic application enables the HTML5 <Video> tag with Smooth Streaming in Metro style apps. “

Please check out the complete post here.

Announcing: Smooth Streaming Client SDK (Beta) for Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:52:00 GMT

On Wednesday, February 29, Windows division proudly unveiled the Windows 8 Consumer Preview release to the world. As of Friday March 9, we are excited to announce a beta of the new Smooth Streaming Client for Windows 8, which provides capabilities to integrate Smooth Streaming to video element in Windows 8 Metro style apps. Aligned to this release is the release of Player Framework for Windows 8 that makes it easy for you to build rich apps that consume video and provides player controls that you can use in your Windows Metro Style Applications.

Using Player Framework and Smooth Streaming Client SDK you can build rich media experiences on Windows 8 using the same back-end infrastructure you use today to target Smooth Streaming playback to other devices like browser, Windows Phone, Set-top boxes, other mobile devices and so on.

This version of the Smooth Streaming Client and Player Framework lights the following capabilities with the video element:

On-demand Playback (Play, Pause, Stop, Seek)
Live Playback (Playback)
VC-1 and H.264 codec support
Content Protection w/ PlayReady integration

Getting Started

The initial documentation is available through Readme included with the release, and you can download the Smooth Streaming Client for Windows 8 (Beta) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

To help you get started with this new SDK using the Player Framework, we’re providing a getting started documentation on CodePlex. To get started developing on Windows 8 you should head over to the Windows 8 Dev Center.

For more information on the Smooth Streaming Platform and ecosystem you can visit IIS.net Media and Microsoft Media Platform sites.

Feedback

As this is a beta release, you’re likely to hit issues, have feature requests, or want to provide general feedback—we want to hear it all! Please use the Smooth Streaming Client on Windows 8 Forum thread to let us know what’s working, what isn’t, and how we can improve your Smooth Streaming development experience for Metro style apps.

IIS Smooth Streaming encoding for Windows Phone 7

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:16:43 GMT

We recently announced the release of IIS Smooth Streaming Client 1.1 for Windows Phone 7 (link). Shortly after, Microsoft also announced release of client’s companion Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) 2.2 (link). SMF utilizes the client and offers easier app development for Windows Phone 7 through rich controls. I would not get into this more at this point of time. You can always find more documentation on that online.

Using the tools above you can have an awesome app on an awesome phone :). Here is a quick snapshot of what Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) based default player looks like.

What you want in addition is an awesome experience for the end users streaming and that is more than building a great app. Windows Phone 7 requires you to encode your videos in a special way. In this post I wanted to cover that topic and provide some tips on how you can ensure that the experience is awesome too.

Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Encoding requirements

The article on MSDN titled ‘Supported Media Codecs for Windows Phone’ outlines the various codecs, resolution, profile, etc. that WP7 supports. I would encourage you to look at it if you haven’t already. As this post talks about IIS Smooth Streaming for WP7, I have compiled a short list (cheat sheet) of things you need to care about.

Supported Codecs
- Device: VC1 / H.264 for video, WMA Pro/HEAAC/AACL for audio. You can refer to link mentioned above for more details on profiles, etc.
- Emulator: As of now only VC1/WMA is supported in the emulator. This means you would need a device to test playback of H.264 content.
Maximum Resolution (H.264)
- 720 x 480 pixels at 30 fps
- 720 x 576 pixels at 25 fps
Support for Variable resolution streams – NO.
- Let me explain this further. If you have done Smooth Streaming, you will see that for most content, most bitrates have a different encoded resolution. This is not supported on WP7 today and all bitrates should have the same resolution. I have covered this more in FAQ section below as well.

Recommended Profile

Disclaimer: We strongly encourage you to test this profile in your network and app conditions before you go out an deploy this. We have tested the below and found it works well in most conditions but you can never be too sure.

The reason I start with a disclaimer here is that it is hard to find the best profile that meets everyone’s needs and encoding is a really specialized field. The profile mentioned below should work well in most conditions. Also, the profile mentioned below is if you are targeting WP7 only. You can mix is it with other profiles to find a super profile that works multi screen for you. Super profile is a topic for another post as that is a much longer conversation.

There are quite a few things to take into consideration while designing your profile. Some of these are:

Be aware of the device’s constraints in terms of bitrate, resolution, etc. You totally don’t want to stream something the device can’t play or can’t play well.
There will be some users who would stream over WiFi but at the same time there will be some who try to stream over 3G. 3G networks would have higher latencies involved. Having a good range of bitrates helps.
The device will be in motion, think of a person travelling with the phone in his car and streaming. This does not affect encoding profiles directly but it does have some bearing. Having a good range of bitrates helps here too.
Another thing to keep in mind is are there other devices you want to target with the same content. If yes, what are the restrictions of those devices.

Video

Keeping the above considerations in mind, here is a profile that we recommend you use:

Video Codec	Profile @ Level	Bitrate	Width	Height	FPS
H.264	Main @ 3.0	1000	640	352	Full <= 30
H.264	Main @ 3.0	800	640	352	Full <= 30
H.264	Main @ 3.0	600	640	352	Full <= 30
H.264	Main @ 3.0	400	640	352	Full <= 30
H.264	Main @ 3.0	200	640	352	Half <= 15
H.264	Main @ 3.0	100	640	352	Half <= 15

Audio

You could pick either AAC-LC or HEAAC:

AAC-LC audio at 64 kbps 48 kHz mono.
HE-AAC audio at 64 kbps 48 kHz mono.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

I already have content encoded with variable resolutions, what do I do to make it work on WP7?
Ans: You can use the RestrictTracks API provided by the IIS Smooth Streaming Client on Windows Phone 7 to restrict the set of video tracks (or QualityLevels) to a set that has the same resolution. In the worst case this would be just a single bitrate. Of course, the other option would be to re-encode. Note: RestrictTracks should be called in the event handler for ManifestReady for it to work as intended.
I am encoding content for multiple screens, are there any recommendations for me?
Ans: There are various ways to solve this. One of them is to use a profile that is a superset of bitrates each screen requires (e.g., Windows Phone and Silverlight on desktop). Once you have this set (a.k.a. super profile) use APIs in the client to restrict playback to the intended subset of bitrates for that device (you can use RestrictTracks on Phone and SelectTracks for desktop). Other options include keeping separate assets for each non overlapping screen. Note: RestrictTracks should be called in the event handler for ManifestReady for it to work as intended.
Can I have a mix of baseline and main profile content in a single stream for H.264 Smooth content?
Ans: No, this is not currently supported.
Does emulator support H.264 content playback?
Ans: No, emulator does not support H.264 playback. You would need a device to test H.264 Smooth Streaming playback.
Does Windows Phone 7 support H.264 Profile Level 3.1?
Ans: Only H.264 profile level 3.0 is guaranteed to work as of today. Detailed codec specific limitations are available here.
Is the suggestion to always use for IIS Smooth Streaming Client for Smooth Streaming content playback on Windows Phone 7? Can I write my own client?
Ans:IIS team strongly discourages writing your own client as the intention of the client is to ease development and provide consistent support across server versions. To ease development you can also use Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) 2.2 or higher. SMF internally uses IIS Smooth Streaming Client but facilitates faster app development with ready-made controls.

NAB Show 2010 – it was fabulous

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 07:06:00 GMT

I just came back from Las Vegas yesterday after attending the NAB Show. It was my first NAB Show and it was a fabulous experience. If you have never attended a NAB show and you are related to broadcasting space or even online media space, I strongly recommend attending it next year to get an understanding of sheer size of the show and the potential.

My purpose for attending this show was to network with participants, evangelize IIS Smooth Streaming and look for partnership opportunities. I think the show met the purpose on all three fronts. Thank you all those who visited our booth and gave us a chance to provide details on the cool technology pieces we are building at Microsoft. Here is the complete Microsoft press release from NAB.

While we had a lot going on at the booth, here are things we were demoing at our stations directly:

IIS Smooth Streaming Client and Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) – showcased demos with Multiple audio languages and subtitles using SMF and the demos worked flawless. We demoed how you could build a player with less than 10 lines of code using SMF.
IIS Smooth Streaming in 3D – this demo was a crowd puller. It may be the colored 3D glasses but people loved watching 3D content in a browser and the same content was also demoed on a TV connected to a set top box running Silverlight. This demo was done working very closely with Level 3. More details here.
Rough Cut Editor tool – this is another super cool tool. You can create a new source by combing portions of multiple individual sources (including live sources) in a matter of a few minutes. The tool is really easy to use and super useful in creating highlights.
Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF) and visualizations of data using Pivot / Azure (Silverlytics) – SAF already integrates top analytics providers and enables easy analytics integration for Silverlight applications including the ones that use IIS Smooth Streaming. The folks at Location 3 Media used MSAF and Microsoft Pivot to create some super cool visualizations for real-time analytics data.
Silverlight Enhanced Movie Framework – this framework allows for rich Blu-ray like experiences with offline Silverlight apps. The demos included the movie “The Hangover” among others at the booth.
IIS Smooth Streaming for iPhone / iPad - at the booth we demoed live IIS Smooth Streaming to an iPhone and iPad. The same stream was also consumed in Silverlight at the same time.
IIS Smooth Streaming for Windows Phone 7
IIS Smooth Streaming for Nokia S60 devices
Expression Encoder 4 (EE4) – the demo here was encoding and delivering HD content using IIS Smooth Streaming and EE4 running on the same machine. EE4 is going to be a great tool when it ships. All you enthusiasts should watch out for the release.

Here are some screenshots from the demos:

View Full Album

As you can guess from a really strong lineup above we had an emphatic response at the booth. Customers/ Partners were always at our booth and showed appreciation for the technology. We had a good mix of visitors from large corporations to small startup shops.

At Microsoft we really value our partners so there were some really cool partner demos at our booth from Kaltura, Extend Media, THX, Level 3 and many more. I will try to cover them in subsequent blog posts. Trust me if you weren’t there, you would love to know more about them and if you were there, you must have surely loved them. Let me know your thoughts on NAB and demos through comments. Looking forward to hear from you.

Composite Manifest Support for Rough Cut Editing scenarios in SSME

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:29:00 GMT

We released the Beta 2 for the IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit (SSPDK) that contains the SmoothStreamingMediaElement (SSME) interface. With this release we added a fun new feature. We refer to this as Composite Manifest Support for Rough Cut Editing. The idea is simple:

I have many clips but want to create a composite clip taking relevant portions from these clips.
I have a large clip from an NBA game, I want to create a highlight for this game.

Now, let’s expand this simple idea. Not only do I want the above, I also want the ability to present this as a single stream to the user. This means the user can fast forward, rewind across the entire highlights and seek to any points in the highlight. In addition, I can add markers and present useful information to the user watching the stream. Well, this is exactly what we enabled with the Beta 2 release of SSPDK.

Composite Manifest

At the heart of this feature are small updates to the existing IIS Smooth Streaming Client manifest structure and we this new manifest a composite stream manifest (.csm). If you have used Smooth Streaming, you might already be familiar with the client manifest structure. Here is what it looks like before this feature:

Code Snippet

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" ?>
<!-- Created with Expression Encoder version 3.0.1332.0-->
<SmoothStreamingMedia MajorVersion="2" MinorVersion="0" Duration="300000000">
  <StreamIndex Type="video" Chunks="15" QualityLevels="8" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" DisplayWidth="640" DisplayHeight="480" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(video={start time})">
    <QualityLevel Index="0" Bitrate="1644000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBF213F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081B22B6457400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="1" Bitrate="1241000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBE613F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081A5DECBBE400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="2" Bitrate="937000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBDC13F0EF8A13F83BE80C90811C97F260C00000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="3" Bitrate="708000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD60D509F8A0D5827E80C9081159AD66CC00000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="4" Bitrate="534000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD00D509F8A0D5827E80C9081104B412F400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="5" Bitrate="403000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBCC0D509F8A0D5827E80C90808C4BE263400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="6" Bitrate="305000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C80B50878A0B5821E80C9080894E4A76400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="7" Bitrate="230000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C60B50878A0B5821E80C90800704704DC00000010E5A67F840" />
    <c t="0" />
    <c t="22350000" />
    <c t="42370000" />
    <c t="62390000" />
    <c t="82410000" />
    <c t="102430000" />
    <c t="122450000" />
    <c t="142470000" />
    <c t="162490000" />
    <c t="182510000" />
    <c t="202530000" />
    <c t="222550000" />
    <c t="242570000" />
    <c t="262590000" />
    <c t="282610000" d="17350001" />
  </StreamIndex>
  <StreamIndex Type="audio" Index="0" FourCC="WMAP" Chunks="15" QualityLevels="1" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(audio={start time})">
    <QualityLevel Bitrate="192000" SamplingRate="44100" Channels="2" BitsPerSample="16" PacketSize="8917" AudioTag="354" CodecPrivateData="1000030000000000000000000000E0000000" />
    <c t="0" />
    <c t="22291156" />
    <c t="40867120" />
    <c t="60371882" />
    <c t="84056235" />
    <c t="100774603" />
    <c t="121208163" />
    <c t="143034920" />
    <c t="160682086" />
    <c t="181580045" />
    <c t="202013605" />
    <c t="221518367" />
    <c t="242880725" />
    <c t="260789115" />
    <c t="282354648" d="17993650" />
  </StreamIndex>
</SmoothStreamingMedia>

To explain the structure in simpler terms, we have the following relationship: SmoothStreamingMedia contains StreamIndex that contains QualityLevel and ‘c’ elements.

Clip Element

Let’s say, I only want the first 10 seconds of the clip above as one of the clips in the RCE manifest. In the new RCE structure I would represent this as below:

Note: <<source to original manifest>> actually points to the URL for the manifest from which we need to play first 10 seconds.

Code Snippet

<Clip Url="<<source to original manifest>>" ClipBegin="0" ClipEnd="100000000">
  <StreamIndex Type="video" Chunks="5" QualityLevels="8" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" DisplayWidth="640" DisplayHeight="480" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(video={start time})">
    <QualityLevel Index="0" Bitrate="1644000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBF213F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081B22B6457400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="1" Bitrate="1241000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBE613F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081A5DECBBE400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="2" Bitrate="937000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBDC13F0EF8A13F83BE80C90811C97F260C00000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="3" Bitrate="708000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD60D509F8A0D5827E80C9081159AD66CC00000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="4" Bitrate="534000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD00D509F8A0D5827E80C9081104B412F400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="5" Bitrate="403000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBCC0D509F8A0D5827E80C90808C4BE263400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="6" Bitrate="305000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C80B50878A0B5821E80C9080894E4A76400000010E5A67F840" />
    <QualityLevel Index="7" Bitrate="230000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C60B50878A0B5821E80C90800704704DC00000010E5A67F840" />
    <c t="0" />
    <c t="22350000" />
    <c t="42370000" />
    <c t="62390000" />
    <c t="82410000" d="20020000" />
  </StreamIndex>
  <StreamIndex Type="audio" Index="0" FourCC="WMAP" Chunks="5" QualityLevels="1" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(audio={start time})">
    <QualityLevel Bitrate="192000" SamplingRate="44100" Channels="2" BitsPerSample="16" PacketSize="8917" AudioTag="354" CodecPrivateData="1000030000000000000000000000E0000000" />
    <c t="0" />
    <c t="22291156" />
    <c t="40867120" />
    <c t="60371882" />
    <c t="84056235" d="16718368" />
  </StreamIndex>
</Clip>

If you notice carefully, all we have done is changed the relationship above to: SmoothStreamingMedia contains Clip and Clip contains StreamIndex. Finally StreamIndex contains QualityLevel and ‘c’ elements.

While doing this we defined a new element called Clip which has attributes called Url, ClipBegin and ClipEnd.

Url – this specifies the Url to the original source manifest from which these clips were cut. The value is exactly as you would set on the SmoothStreamingSource property in SSME (e.g., http://abcxyz.com/sample.ism/Manifest).
ClipBegin – This specifies the time in nanoseconds where to begin the playback for the clip.
ClipEnd – This specifies time in nanoseconds where to end to end the playback for the clip.

You will also notice that ‘c’ elements are still present in this composite manifest. This is done so that this manifest is self sufficient and you don’t need to download the source manifest. ‘c’ elements are essentially chunk timestamps for the FMP4 chunks the client will download.

Note: Not all ‘c’ elements are included in this manifest. The idea is to include only the ones needed to represent the section of the clip. In this case times are close to the ClipBegin and ClipEnd. They may not exactly match in timestamps as chunks are 2 seconds apart typically while the Clip is cut at finer granularity.

Multiple Clip Elements

In the section above, we saw how to compose a single clip. However, composite manifest promises to have multiple such clips stitched together. All you need to do is to have multiple such Clip elements and that takes care of that. Here is how an example of composite manifest with two clips will will look like:

Code Snippet

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<SmoothStreamingMedia MajorVersion="2" MinorVersion="0" Duration="200000000">
  <Clip Url="http://abcxyz.com/sample.ism/Manifest" ClipBegin="0" ClipEnd="100000000">
    <StreamIndex Type="video" Chunks="5" QualityLevels="8" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" DisplayWidth="640" DisplayHeight="480" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(video={start time})">
      <QualityLevel Index="0" Bitrate="1644000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBF213F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081B22B6457400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="1" Bitrate="1241000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBE613F0EF8A13F83BE80C9081A5DECBBE400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="2" Bitrate="937000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="640" MaxHeight="480" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBDC13F0EF8A13F83BE80C90811C97F260C00000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="3" Bitrate="708000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD60D509F8A0D5827E80C9081159AD66CC00000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="4" Bitrate="534000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBD00D509F8A0D5827E80C9081104B412F400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="5" Bitrate="403000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="428" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBCC0D509F8A0D5827E80C90808C4BE263400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="6" Bitrate="305000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C80B50878A0B5821E80C9080894E4A76400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="7" Bitrate="230000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="364" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FC3C60B50878A0B5821E80C90800704704DC00000010E5A67F840" />
      <c t="0" />
      <c t="22350000" />
      <c t="42370000" />
      <c t="62390000" />
      <c t="82410000" d="20020000" />
    </StreamIndex>
    <StreamIndex Type="audio" Index="0" FourCC="WMAP" Chunks="5" QualityLevels="1" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(audio={start time})">
      <QualityLevel Bitrate="192000" SamplingRate="44100" Channels="2" BitsPerSample="16" PacketSize="8917" AudioTag="354" CodecPrivateData="1000030000000000000000000000E0000000" />
      <c t="0" />
      <c t="22291156" />
      <c t="40867120" />
      <c t="60371882" />
      <c t="84056235" d="16718368" />
    </StreamIndex>
  </Clip>
  <Clip Url="http://abcxyz.com/sample2.ism/Manifest" ClipBegin="60000000" ClipEnd="160000000">
    <StreamIndex Type="video" Chunks="5" QualityLevels="8" MaxWidth="848" MaxHeight="476" DisplayWidth="848" DisplayHeight="476" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(video={start time})">
      <QualityLevel Index="0" Bitrate="1644000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="848" MaxHeight="476" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBB21A70ED8A1A783B68045081B22B6457400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="1" Bitrate="1241000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="848" MaxHeight="476" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCBA61A70ED8A1A783B68045081A5DECBBE400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="2" Bitrate="937000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="848" MaxHeight="476" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB9C1A70ED8A1A783B680450811C97F260C00000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="3" Bitrate="708000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="568" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB9611B09F8A11B827E8045081159AD66CC00000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="4" Bitrate="534000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="568" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB9011B09F8A11B827E8045081104B412F400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="5" Bitrate="403000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="568" MaxHeight="320" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB8C11B09F8A11B827E80450808C4BE263400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="6" Bitrate="305000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="480" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB880EF0878A0EF821E8045080894E4A76400000010E5A67F840" />
      <QualityLevel Index="7" Bitrate="230000" FourCC="WVC1" MaxWidth="480" MaxHeight="272" CodecPrivateData="250000010FCB860EF0878A0EF821E80450800704704DC00000010E5A67F840" />
      <c t="60000000" />
      <c t="80000000" />
      <c t="100000000" />
      <c t="120000000" />
      <c t="140000000" d="20000000"/>
    </StreamIndex>
    <StreamIndex Type="audio" Index="0" FourCC="WMAP" Chunks="6" QualityLevels="1" Url="QualityLevels({bitrate})/Fragments(audio={start time})">
      <QualityLevel Bitrate="192000" SamplingRate="44100" Channels="2" BitsPerSample="16" PacketSize="8917" AudioTag="354" CodecPrivateData="1000030000000000000000000000E0000000" />
      <c t="42724716" />
      <c t="61082992" />
      <c t="80341043" />
      <c t="103096598" />
      <c t="120279365" />
      <c t="142570521" d="21362358" />
    </StreamIndex>
  </Clip>
</SmoothStreamingMedia>

With this, you can now upload this manifest along with the original manifests and content used by them to a HTTP accessible location. Next, set the SmoothStreamingSource property to the URL to this composite manifest and SSME should take care of the rest. Here is how it will look like in XAML:

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication6.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement SmoothStreamingSource="http://abcxyz.com/SampleRCEManifest.csm" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" />
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

We will have more detailed documentation up on iis.net very soon.In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions.

IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit Beta 2 released

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:14:00 GMT

Today, we are very both excited and pleased to announce and release a Beta 2 of IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit (SSPDK) 1.0. With this release are adding support for Fast Forward/Rewind and Rough Cut Editing scenarios in addition to other features. Please see details below.

SSPDK is intended to aid the development of rich Smooth Streaming players and experiences. This Kit enables you to build players for both On Demand and Live playback with full DVR capabilities, Live Ad Insertion, Multiple Camera Angles and many more such rich functionalities. This Kit is available for download here – Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 2.

The kit includes:

Smooth Streaming Player SDK – This enables developers and designers to build rich Smooth Streaming player experiences. We are providing a .net (Silverlight) based SDK with full XAML support. The core part of this infrastructure is Smooth Streaming Media Element that is similar to Silverlight Media Element if you are already familiar with Silverlight development platform.
Push Encoder – This tool allows you to simulate a live stream for testing purposes.
Sample Smooth Streaming Player (built on Smooth Streaming Player SDK) – This is a sample that uses Smooth Streaming Player SDK and enables you to test the IIS Media Services 3.0.

In the meantime here is a high level overview of features that SSME supports today:

Basic Playback controls

APIs such as Play, Pause, Stop, etc.
Events for Playback and Diagnostics
Properties to track position, etc.

Advanced Playback support

DVR support for Live Smooth Streaming
Support for keeping track of Live event while in DVR (*new in Beta 2*)
Trick Play: Slow Motion
Trick Play: Fast Forward / Rewind (*new in Beta 2*)

H.264 / AAC support (*new in Beta 2*)
Monetization

Ad Playback integration – scheduling capabilities, tracking Ad progress
Live Ad Insertion with Live Smooth Streaming
Rich Analytics with IIS Advanced Logging
Support for specifying markers/Ad ingestion point outside the main manifest (*new in Beta 2*)

Content Protection – PlayReady integration for VC1 content
Composite Manifest Support for scenarios like Rough Cut Editing (*new in Beta 2*)
Selecting Tracks for playback (e.g., restrict the bit-rates available, support multiple camera angles in a single stream, etc.)
Support for progressive download Ads/content
SSME is used in Silverlight Media Framework(SMF) and the partnership helps facilitate faster player development

BREAKING CHANGES:

As the Beta evolved we have had to make some changes to some of our APIs. Here is a list of breaking changes:

Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming.SmoothStreamingMediaElementState replaces System.Web.Media.MediaElementState as type for CurrentState
ManifestDownloaded event is now called ManifestReady.
SmoothStreaming.IsClipPlaying property is deprecated. There is a new state SmoothStreamingMediaElementState.ClipPlaying for the same purpose.

Resources

Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 2
More Information on Smooth Player Development
API documentation for Smooth Streaming Player SDK
More Information on Smooth Streaming
More Information on Live Smooth Streaming
Supporting documentation on getting started

If you are using this kit already to build rich experiences, do let us know. Send me the URL to your player or just add comments below. We are looking forward to customers building really rich experiences.

Building your first Smooth Streaming Player using SSME

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:24:00 GMT

In this post I plan to cover building a very basic Smooth Streaming Player using Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) part of Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit. In other words, building a “Hello World” equivalent for Smooth Streaming Client (“Hello Smooth Streaming”). This post is split into two parts. In the first part, I will be covering how to get basic playback working in a browser window for Smooth Streaming content. This should be really easy as you will see. In the second part, we would add some basic playback controls like Play, Pause, Stop and Volume controls.

Prerequisites

You should either have Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio installed along with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. You can get more information on this here.

Install the Smooth Streaming Developer Kit available here.

This is not a XAML overview session so basic XAML knowledge is required.

Building a Simple Smooth Streaming Player for Playback

The very first thing I wanted to cover here was just basic playback. There are no controls. All you get is a browser window that shows the video playing.

The below outlines steps to achieve this:

Open Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio.

Go to: File –> New Project.

Chose Visual C# as project Type and then select Silverlight. Choose Silverlight Application, name it SimplePlayer.

In your project go to references and add a reference to Microsoft.Web.Media.Smoothstreaming.dll (available as a part of Player development Kit)

Modify MainPage.xaml as under. Set the SmoothStreamingSource property in XAML to the location of the Smooth Streaming content. Replace <> with the URL of the content (E.g., it will look something like http://example.com/a.isml/Manifest)

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"

    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"

    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">

  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">

    <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<>" Grid.Row="0" />

  Grid>

UserControl>

This is all you need to get a basic playback working with Smooth Streaming Media Element.

Adding Playback Controls to your Player

Next, once you have the basic playback working, you may want to add some basic controls like Play/Pause button, Stop Button and Volume Control.

Here is what you will see after completing the steps below:

The UI layout

Here are the pieces we need for this in terms of the layout.

Have portion of the screen, which will display the slider control for volume and Play/Pause and Stop buttons

We need a portion for the Video to display

We need to hook these buttons/slider to SSME

For the overall layout, we are using XAML constructs of Stack Panels. here is how we do it in this example:

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"

    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"

    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">

  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">

        <Grid.RowDefinitions>

            <RowDefinition Height="0.95*">RowDefinition>

            <RowDefinition Height="0.05*">RowDefinition>

        Grid.RowDefinitions>

        <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<>" Grid.Row="0" />

        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Row="1">

            <TextBlock x:Name="Volume" VerticalAlignment="Center" Text="Volume" Width="50" />

            <Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />

            <Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>

            <Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />

        StackPanel>

    Grid>

UserControl>

We have a Grid with two rows: the first row is SSME and second is a horizontal Stack Panel that has volume slide and Pause / Stop buttons. This is all we need to get the basic layout.

Linking UI to SSME

The next step after getting the UI is to link it back to SSME. We already know how to play the video in SSME. In this section I would cover how to hook up the buttons and the slider.

Silverlight has a concept of template binding that can be used here. In the case of slider, we have a slider volume UI control and a volume property on SSME. All we need to do here is to tell Silverlight via the XAML to bind the slider value to the volume property on SSME. Here is how we do it:

Code Snippet

<Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />

If you see, all we are doing here is saying that bind the Slider Value to the SmoothPlayer’s Volume Path (or property).

For the Play / Pause and Stop buttons, we take a slightly different approach here:

Code Snippet

<Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>

<Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />

Here we want the following to happen:

For the Play/Pause button, we want to do some actions when the button is loaded and then a different action when it is clicked. For this, we hook these actions to PlayButton_Click and PlayButton_Loaded methods in the MainPage.xaml.cs file

For the Stop button we just need to handle the click so we hook up Click with StopButton_Click method.

In the MainPage.xaml.cs file we need to have these methods and do the needful there. Here is what we are doing in this example:

Note: There are other (better) ways of coding this but for simplicity I have tried to keep it very basic for this example

PlayButton_Loaded

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    //We need to prepopulate the value of Play/Pause button content, we need to check AutoPlay

    switch (SmoothPlayer.AutoPlay)

    {

        case false:

            PlayButton.Content = "Play";

            break;

        case true:

            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";

            break;

    }

}

PlayButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    //Monitor the state of the content to determine the right action to take on this button being clicked

    //and then change the text to reflect the next action

    switch (SmoothPlayer.CurrentState)

    {

        case MediaElementState.Playing:

            SmoothPlayer.Pause();

            PlayButton.Content = "Play";

            break;

        case MediaElementState.Stopped:

        case MediaElementState.Paused:

            SmoothPlayer.Play();

            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";

            break;

    }

}

StopButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void StopButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    //This should simply stop the playback

    SmoothPlayer.Stop();

    //We should also reflect the chang on the play button

    PlayButton.Content = "Play";

}

Summary

In this post, we looked at creating a basic player with common controls for playback of Smooth Streaming Content. Let me know if you have issues or need further help. In subsequent posts I would be diving into adding more features into this player.

The project sample for this example is availble here(SimplePlayer.zip).

Note: These are just samples meant for educational purposes and there is no guarantee conferred on the quality of code

Building your first Smooth Streaming Player using SSME

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:24:00 GMT

Prerequisites

You should either have Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio installed along with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. You can get more information on this here.
Install the Smooth Streaming Developer Kit available here.
This is not a XAML overview session so basic XAML knowledge is required.

Building a Simple Smooth Streaming Player for Playback

The very first thing I wanted to cover here was just basic playback. There are no controls. All you get is a browser window that shows the video playing.

The below outlines steps to achieve this:

Open Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio.
Go to: File –> New Project.
Chose Visual C# as project Type and then select Silverlight. Choose Silverlight Application, name it SimplePlayer.
In your project go to references and add a reference to Microsoft.Web.Media.Smoothstreaming.dll (available as a part of Player development Kit)
Modify MainPage.xaml as under. Set the SmoothStreamingSource property in XAML to the location of the Smooth Streaming content. Replace <<Add your URL here>> with the URL of the content (E.g., it will look something like http://example.com/a.isml/Manifest)

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
    <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<<Add your URL here>>" Grid.Row="0" />
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

This is all you need to get a basic playback working with Smooth Streaming Media Element.

Adding Playback Controls to your Player

Next, once you have the basic playback working, you may want to add some basic controls like Play/Pause button, Stop Button and Volume Control.

Here is what you will see after completing the steps below:

The UI layout

Here are the pieces we need for this in terms of the layout.

Have portion of the screen, which will display the slider control for volume and Play/Pause and Stop buttons
We need a portion for the Video to display
We need to hook these buttons/slider to SSME

For the overall layout, we are using XAML constructs of Stack Panels. here is how we do it in this example:

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="0.95*"></RowDefinition>
            <RowDefinition Height="0.05*"></RowDefinition>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<<Add your URL here>>" Grid.Row="0" />
        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Row="1">
            <TextBlock x:Name="Volume" VerticalAlignment="Center" Text="Volume" Width="50" />
            <Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />
            <Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>
            <Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />
        </StackPanel>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

We have a Grid with two rows: the first row is SSME and second is a horizontal Stack Panel that has volume slide and Pause / Stop buttons. This is all we need to get the basic layout.

Linking UI to SSME

The next step after getting the UI is to link it back to SSME. We already know how to play the video in SSME. In this section I would cover how to hook up the buttons and the slider.

Code Snippet

<Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />

If you see, all we are doing here is saying that bind the Slider Value to the SmoothPlayer’s Volume Path (or property).

For the Play / Pause and Stop buttons, we take a slightly different approach here:

Code Snippet

<Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>
<Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />

Here we want the following to happen:

For the Play/Pause button, we want to do some actions when the button is loaded and then a different action when it is clicked. For this, we hook these actions to PlayButton_Click and PlayButton_Loaded methods in the MainPage.xaml.cs file
For the Stop button we just need to handle the click so we hook up Click with StopButton_Click method.

In the MainPage.xaml.cs file we need to have these methods and do the needful there. Here is what we are doing in this example:

Note: There are other (better) ways of coding this but for simplicity I have tried to keep it very basic for this example

PlayButton_Loaded

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //We need to prepopulate the value of Play/Pause button content, we need to check AutoPlay
    switch (SmoothPlayer.AutoPlay)
    {
        case false:
            PlayButton.Content = "Play";
            break;
        case true:
            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";
            break;
    }
}

PlayButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //Monitor the state of the content to determine the right action to take on this button being clicked
    //and then change the text to reflect the next action
    switch (SmoothPlayer.CurrentState)
    {
        case MediaElementState.Playing:
            SmoothPlayer.Pause();
            PlayButton.Content = "Play";
            break;
        case MediaElementState.Stopped:
        case MediaElementState.Paused:
            SmoothPlayer.Play();
            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";
            break;
    }
}

StopButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void StopButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //This should simply stop the playback
    SmoothPlayer.Stop();
    //We should also reflect the chang on the play button
    PlayButton.Content = "Play";
}

Summary

The project sample for this example is availble here(SimplePlayer.zip).

Note: These are just samples meant for educational purposes and there is no guarantee conferred on the quality of code

IIS Advanced Logging 1.0 Released

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:11:00 GMT

We proudly announce the release of IIS Advanced Logging 1.0.

IIS Advanced Logging 1.0 includes the following features:

Client-side logging. Advanced Logging builds capabilities into IIS to accept client-side consumption metrics. This provides relevant and important user engagement metrics that your customers will love.
Centralized logging. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to set up a central log farm that collects and logs client-side metrics. This reduces the effort required to collect distributed logs, and consolidated log collection results in more efficient post-processing. I wanted to clarify that this is not for all logging. Note: This is for client-side logging.
Multiple Logs per request. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to filter information relevant to specific purposes by creating multiple logs per request, with each log containing data relevant to the log's purpose. For example, Quality of Service (QoS) data in one log and Analytics data in another. All the post-processing required to distill the information using today's solutions is no longer needed.
Real-time logging. Advanced Logging can extend the platform to support real-time analytics, helping you to provide real-time reports to customers or work with partners to do the same.
Rich/Flexible logging. Advanced Logging does not assume what is important to you. Instead, it provides enough control to specify what fields are important to you, add additional fields with ease, and provide policies around log rollover and request filtering. These capabilities do not exist today. Now you can log any of the HTTP request/response headers, IIS server variables, and client-side fields with simple configuration through the management console.
Application Logging. Making use of the IIS configuration system, Advanced Logging provides capabilities to generate separate logs for sites, applications and so on.
Module Specific Log fields. If you are developing modules for IIS, you can specify custom fields that can be collected in logs.
Log Filtering. Logging now has the ability to filter requests to be logged based on the values in the log fields

You can learn more about the feature by reading the walkthroughs:

Getting started with Advanced Logging
Real-Time Logging
Client Logging
Learn more about the feature on - http://www.iis.net/extensions/AdvancedLogging

We eagerly await your feedback and comments on the Advanced Logging Discussion Forum.

IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 Released

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:08:00 GMT

Today, we released IIS Media Services 3.0 that supports both On Demand, Live Smooth Streaming and IIS Advanced Logging. Please refer to the announcement of this release in Chris Knowlton’s blog post for details. As a part of this release, we are very both excited and pleased to announce and release a Beta of IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0. This is intended to aid the development of rich Smooth Streaming players and experiences. This Kit allows you to build players for both On Demand and Live playback with full DVR capabilities, Live Ad Insertion, Multiple Camera Angles and many more such rich functionalities. This Kit is available for download here – Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1.

The kit includes:

Smooth Streaming Player SDK – This enables developers and designers to build rich Smooth Streaming player experiences. We are providing a .net (Silverlight) based SDK with full XAML support. The core part of this infrastructure is Smooth Streaming Media Element that is similar to Silverlight Media Element if you are already familiar with Silverlight development platform. There is initial documentation of the APIs are available on MSDN.
Push Encoder – This tool allows you to simulate a live stream for testing purposes.
Sample Smooth Streaming Player (built on Smooth Streaming Player SDK) – This is a sample that uses Smooth Streaming Player SDK and enables you to test the IIS Media Services 3.0.

More instructions on using the Sample player and Push Encoder to test Live Smooth Streaming in your environment are available in the walkthrough here.

As I mentioned earlier, the Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) APIs provide an easy interface for developers and designers to create rich Smooth Streaming experiences using the Silverlight platform. These APIs provide support for simple operations like Play, Pause and Stop and also more complex ones like scheduling Ads, selecting and tracking bit-rates for Smooth Streaming playback and many more. Please stay tuned on this blog for samples on how to use these APIs to build experiences. I will start with basic playback and progress on to building richer player applications.

In the meantime here is a high level overview of features that SSME supports today:

Basic Playback controls
- APIs like Play, Pause, Stop, etc.
- Events for Playback and Diagnostics
- Properties to track position, etc.
Advanced Playback support
- DVR support for Live Smooth Streaming
- Trick Play: Slow Motion
Monetization
- Ad Playback integration – scheduling capabilities, tracking Ad progress
- Live Ad Insertion w/ Live Smooth Streaming
- Rich Analytics w/ IIS Advanced Logging
Content Protection – PlayReady integration
XAML support for designers
Selecting Tracks for playback (e.g., restrict the bit-rates available, support multiple camera angles in a single stream, etc.)
Support for progressive download Ads/content
Almost all of the Silverlight Media Element APIs are available for Smooth Streaming w/ SSME

Resources

Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1
API documentation for Smooth Streaming Player SDK
More Information on Smooth Streaming
More Information on Live Smooth Streaming

Hope you have fun using this SDK, the same way we did developing it.

Happy Smooth Streaming.

Streaming, is this the answer to Piracy?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:11:10 GMT

As a part of my routine reading exercise, I came across a recent blog post by one of my favorite personalities online – Fred Wilson.

In his blog post Fred discusses how streaming is getting the better of piracy.

I have to agree, once you get good quality content online, in a way that does not take too much time/effort, you are willing to pay. Netflix success is a great example here. Hulu is another testament to this and so are many other online services that deliver online video. It is appalling that sometimes the only way to get certain content online is by actually engaging in piracy. This has to change. It will.

Here’s a quote from the blog post:

Yesterday morning I was talking to my 13 year old son Josh. He's currently obsessed with the TV show Friday Night Lights. He's going back and watching all the old seasons. I asked him how he is doing that, expecting to hear "bit torrent". But instead he said "Netflix Watch Instantly". I was so happy to hear that and asked him why. He said, "bit torrent takes too long.

This is a great example of the fact that if you do streaming right, even 13 year olds would prefer that over their “top secret” torrent client. Doing streaming right involves good quality, great experience, convenience and good ROI for the content owner / distributor among other things.

I own a XBOX and I use it to watch movies with Netflix “Watch Instantly” service. Even though I feel the online catalogue for Netflix could be beefed up, I am still a fan of the service and ease of use is enough for me to continue being a subscriber. It is implicit the quality has to be good, which it is.

One more area that will give online streaming a much needed boost is Live Streaming. There were multiple technologies used recently to stream Michael Jackson memorial live. NewTeeVee (a popular media blog) has a great post summarizing them. The product I work on (Smooth Streaming) was used in one of these broadcasts (see screenshot below). On offer was a live stream of the event in HD. Now imagine all of remote MJ fans who wanted to be a part of the memorial but could not. This gave them a chance to be a part of the event.

Here’s another example. In India we are crazy about cricket. Now, the most common way of watching cricket today (from here in US) is to look for a blog post and then follow links to watch live broadcast through a torrent based client. The quality of these broadcasts is at the best, pathetic. I know a lot of people in my friend circle who actually use paid sites to watch these matches as the experience matters to them. The point is that users are willing to pay for experience.

Fred also links to a related Guardian article that puts numbers to support the title of this post.

Once we have reliable and worthy streaming online, there would be enough avenues enabling monetization of the delivery and production. Here is a recipe:

Always remember, the first important thing is to draw attention on your site. To draw attention, the most important thing is to have good experience and quality.
Once you have that, traffic would follow.
To retain and grow traffic further, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter could then bring social aspects to your site. With these tools, viewers on your site can share with their friends/followers what they are watching, participate in real-time discussions with them and thus increase traffic virally.
Once you have traffic, there are various well researched monetization models but I don’t plan to go into them here.

To summarize in Wall Street terminology I am extremely bullish on online streaming and shorting piracy.

Disclaimer: I work on the Smooth Streaming (part of IIS Media Services) and I love what I do.

Video: TechEd NA 2009 - Advanced Video Delivery with IIS

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:11:00 GMT

Earlier this week I gave a TechEd session on IIS Media Services - Smooth Streaming, Advanced Logging and the IIS Media Services Ecosystem overall. Thanks to everyone who made it to this talk. It was really nice to have you there and your interest in technology was immense.

Here is the recorded session delivered with Smooth Streaming in case you were not able to make it to the talk.

Advanced Logging – How does Real-time logging work?

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:41:00 GMT

We announced and release a Beta for a sparkling new Logging module for IIS at MIX 09. This is a super rich logging module with a lot of functionality that our team will continue to blog about. Today, I wanted to share more technical details on how my favorite feature, real-time logging work in Advanced Logging.

Before we go into details, you may want to take a short pause and read some overview material in my blog post, extension page for Advanced Logging or go over the custom logging walkthrough. Okay, I will now assume you are somewhat familiar with this module.

Next, let us take a scenario - You have a SL or any HTTP client that collects analytic information that you want to be able to send to IIS web server and get that captured in a log file. Let’s add a little twist, while you want this you also want to be able to write custom code that can consume this log information in real time and enable you to do some real time reporting. The reason you want to do that is just to provide a report on real-time interactions by clients or simply monitor your network in real-time.

Here is how IIS Advanced Logging helps

Let us go over this architecture, step-by-step:

The clients on the left hand side (could be Silverlight application, native Silverlight runtime, could be ASP.net or anything really), sends a HTTP POST message with the log in the body. It is a simple XML format and you can find details in the walkthrough Real-time Logging.
This message lands on an IIS server that has Advanced Logging (AL) installed. The client logging functionality in AL parses this message and raises an internal event.
The core server-side logging functionality gets this event and then looks up the log configuration to compose a log entry and writes it to the file. (Note: you would need to have relevant configuration so that AL knows what fields to expect. You can find an example in the Client logging walkthrough.
In addition, just before an entry is written to the log file, server-side logging raises another event using public APIs (IIS HTTP_TRACE_EVENT infrastructure) that can be consumed by a simple module written by YOU. Believe me, it is a simple module. You can find details and sample code in the walkthrough Real-time Logging.
Now, your module can take this information push it to a service in the cloud, a DB and produce reports in real-time.

Let me know if you need more details. The best to learn more is to try it out :).

IIS Advanced Logging Beta is now Live

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:29:00 GMT

We proudly announce the Beta of IIS Advanced Logging. With Advanced Logging you will be able to capture rich details in your logs and process them in real-time. These capabilities make this feature really compelling by helping you monetize your content with better analytics and improve service with rich QOS information.

IIS Advanced Logging includes the following features:

Client-side logging. Advanced Logging builds capabilities into IIS to accept client-side consumption metrics. This provides relevant and important user engagement metrics that your customers will love.
Centralized logging. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to set up a central log farm that collects and logs client-side metrics. This reduces the effort required to collect distributed logs, and consolidated log collection results in more efficient post-processing. I wanted to clarify that this is not for all logging. Note: This is for client-side logging.
Multiple Logs per request. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to filter information relevant to specific purposes by creating multiple logs per request, with each log containing data relevant to the log's purpose. For example, Quality of Service (QoS) data in one log and Analytics data in another. All the post-processing required to distill the information using today's solutions is no longer needed.
Real-time logging. Advanced Logging can extend the platform to support real-time analytics, helping you to provide real-time reports to customers or work with partners to do the same.
Rich/Flexible logging. Advanced Logging does not assume what is important to you. Instead, it provides enough control to specify what fields are important to you, add additional fields with ease, and provide policies around log rollover and request filtering. These capabilities do not exist today. Now you can log any of the HTTP request/response headers, IIS server variables, and client-side fields with simple configuration through the management console.
Application Logging. Making use of the IIS configuration system, Advanced Logging provides capabilities to generate separate logs for sites, applications and so on.
Module Specific Log fields. If you are developing modules for IIS, you can specify custom fields that can be collected in logs.

You can learn more about the feature by reading the walkthroughs:

Getting started with Advanced Logging
Real-Time Logging
Client Logging
Learn more about the feature on - http://www.iis.net/extensions/AdvancedLogging

We eagerly await your feedback and comments on the Advanced Logging Discussion Forum.

The world of Syndication: Atom 1.0 vs. RSS 2.0?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:39:57 GMT

Syndication has become and inseparable part of the internet. There are two major syndication formats that exist today – RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom 1.0 (Atom Syndication Format). While they achieve the same end result, there are differences. This post attempts to enable you to decide which is more suited to your publishing.

RSS 2.0 is a frozen specification copyrighted by Harvard and Atom 1.0 is a specified in RFC4287. Atom came about as a result of pursuit to fix shortcoming of RSS since RSS was a frozen format. The table below lists the differences in the two specifications/standards:

	Atom 1.0	RSS 2.0	Who wins?
Content Model	Allows text, escaped HTML, well-formed XHTML, XML, base-64 encoded binary or pointer to web content outside the feed.	Text or Escaped HTML	This is a major advantage for Atom, writing escaped HTML affects the readability of RSS feeds
Partial Content	Has separate `<summary>` or `<content>` tags.	Has a `<description>` field. This could contain complete content or just synopsis but has no way of identifying what it contains.	This is another win for Atom, helps you have a synopsis and complete view inside a feed reader
Auto Discovery	Uses the MIME Type `application/atom+xml` which is registered with IANA. In addition the feed has a self link to enable auto subscription in readers	The MIME Type `application/rss+xml` is often used but not recognized by IANA	Having a registered MIME Type and auto subscription really helps discovery. Another Atom win.
Format Flexibility	Atom syndication format allows entries linking to the feed or standalone entries	RSS only recognizes a `<rss>` document.	This is also an Atom win, having standalone entries enables scenarios like linking to entries only.
Extensibility	Atom defines a well-defined structure to extend the default namespace and has specific guidelines on readers should interpret these.	RSS has to fixed namespace, however you could include external XML namespaces.	Atom has a slight advantage here as external namespaces extensions in RSS are not easily discoverable. In Atom’s case these extensions have a corresponding namespace tag
Languages	Atom uses xml:lang for language specificity	RSS has a separate `<language>` tag for language specificity	No one.
Encryption	Atom allows the option to encrypt entries using XML Encryption or XML Digital Signature. In addition the feed could be encrypted entire feed using standard web encryption techniques	RSS only allows encrypting using standard web encryption techniques.	Atom has extra level of encryption possible.
Adoption	Most sites that publish both RSS and Atom feeds.	Most sites that publish both RSS and Atom feeds.	RSS has an advantage of being the first mover, the term RSS has become synonymous with syndication.
Modularity	All elements part of Atom’s namespace can be used outside Atom’s context due to way it was designed	RSS elements cannot be used outside the context of RSS	This has proved to be the one of the major factors of Atom’s popularity and its used in data interactions like those enabled by Google GData

As you might have realized that Atom has considerable benefits over RSS. More and more services online are using Atom as more than just a feed format. Google’s GData and Microsoft’s Project Astoria are great examples and testimonies of Atom 1.0’s strengths as a format. They extend its namespace and harness the capabilities of Atom Publishing Protocol to pass data between their services.

While, I was writing, I realized that I was still publishing an RSS 2.0 feed for my blog (default supported by Drupal). I switched it to Atom 1.0. Have you? My recommendation to you would be switch to Atom as your base feed. Having said that, RSS is still very popular and consumed by many, it is good to retain your RSS feed too. Atom preserves most aspects of RSS so a simple transform (e,g, using XSLT) should be able to help you create and RSS feed from the Atom one.

If you know more examples that demonstrate Atom / RSS’s strength please post your comments below. I would love to hear from you.

Additional Reading:

While I was writing this post, I found RSS20AndAtom10Compared very useful
Atom on Wikipedia
RSS on Wikipedia
RFC 4287 – Atom Syndication Format
RFC 5023 – Atom Publishing

Web Playlists SMIL conversion tool

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:38:00 GMT

With the RC version of Web Playlists, we moved from a custom XML format to a SMIL-based format for storing playlists. As a result of this change the old isx format has been retired. However, Brian Blum (a dev) in our team crafted a tool to help convert the old files. The tool can be downloaded here. Thank you Brian!

As both old and the new SMIL-based playlist formats are XML by nature, this tool uses a XSL to transform the old isx to the new SMIL-based isx format. Another reason for doing this is Brian wanted you to be able to do any minor changes if you so desire without needing to look into the code.

The tool usage is simple and as follows:

isxTranslate.exe /? Coverts prerelease input files for IIS 7.0 Web Playlists to the release format.

Usage: isxTranslate /i PLAYLISTDIR /x XSLT

where PLAYLISTDIR is the path to your playlist files and

XSLT is the xslt to use to convert the playlists.

Example: isxtranslate /i c:\inetweb\wwwroot\playlists /x c:\tools\isx.xsl

Note: This tool is just to help migrate old files and is not released as a part of Web Playlists RC download. As a result this tool is not officially supported. We will be happy to answer any questions and would encourage you to use media forum for your questions.

DOWNLOAD THE TOOL HERE

Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) Released

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:08:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that the Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) release is ready for you to download and deploy.

This release supports upgrade from the previous Go Live release. (Note: It is recommended that if you have a release earlier than Go Live, you should uninstall the old build and then use the downloads below to do a fresh installation.)

You can get the RC downloads here:

32 bit - Download
64 bit - Download
SDK - Download

Here is a list of walkthroughs published that will help you get going with this release:

Please refer to the online readme for more details.

For general information on how Web Playlists work, please see this post.

For us, this release was primarily about two things:

A step towards embracing open standards - The playlist format now is SMIL-based and additionally you can output the playlist in any XML/text format. The walkthrough talks more about this feature and illustrates and example where you can use ATOM as an output format.
Even more thorough testing - This is incremental release over our earlier Go Live release and our test team has tested it even more than previous release

The three key new features in Web Playlists RC release are:

Ability to customize output format - This release enables you to change the response to a Web Playlists request to a format understood by your app. This feature works by taking and XSL style-sheet from you and transforming the ASX response according to it. The walkthrough talks about this in more details.
Allow Client-side Caching - Earlier releases of Web Playlists disabled the client-side caching using http headers. We got customer requests suggesting that although this is a great security feature, they would like to control this so in this release we allow you just that. You can control, whether clients can cache content or not.
SMIL-based playlist format - Earlier releases used a custom XML. With this release, we are moving a step closer to open standards. We are now using a SMIL-based format. While, Web Playlists does not support the entire SMIL syntax, the sub-set supported is fully SMIL compliant. For those upgrading from previous builds, there is a tool available here to convert old isx files.

We would like to hear what you feel about this release and would love to hear how you are using it.

Got more questions or need support?: Please use media forum.