Get it here.

Other vendors have also provided HTTP-based adaptive streaming solutions that are popular in the market today including Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Adobe’s HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS). This is all great news, but it has led to one significant problem: all of these require the use of plugins, proprietary APIs, or native applications in order to play back content.

As we all know, more and more content owners want to provide video playback through the HTML5 video tag in modern browsers. Currently, the W3C spec for HTML5 does not include a standard for streaming video playback with the video tag. Only one vendor has decided to bypass the standards body and implement their own support for their own proprietary streaming protocol: Apple. The Safari browser supports Apple’s HLS technology, which comes in very handy when you want to stream video to an iOS device’s browser. All of the other browser vendors have been holding off on their implementations of a streaming capability until a standard has been established. And that’s where MPEG DASH comes in. With this standard, browser vendors will be able to implement a standard method for adaptive streaming with the video tag, allowing content providers with a means to reach every device and browser by using a single streaming technology. And, of course, it will also be adopted for support in standalone applications that live outside of the browser.

MPEG DASH is a standards effort led by Microsoft and Apple and participated in by over 90 other media and technology companies including Google, Adobe, Sony, and many others. It was recently ratified by MPEG as an ISO/IEC standard and should be adopted by the W3C early next year.

The standards body has formed a Promoter’s Group that offers a great deal of informational content on the DASH standard. Start by checking out this brief overview in PDF form.

A brief introduction to MPEG DASH

The DASH PG provides the diagram above to help explain the scope of the DASH standard. It illustrates a simple streaming scenario between an HTTP server and a DASH client. In the diagram, the multimedia content is captured and stored on an HTTP server and is delivered using HTTP. The content exists on the server in two parts: Media Presentation Description (MPD), which describes a manifest of the available content, its various alternatives, their URL addresses, and other characteristics; and segments, which contain the actual multimedia bitstreams in the form of chunks, in single or multiple files.

To play the content, the DASH client first obtains the MPD. The MPD can be delivered using HTTP, email, thumb drive, broadcast, or other transports. By parsing the MPD, the DASH client learns about the program timing, media-content availability, media types, resolutions, minimum and maximum bandwidths, and the existence of various encoded alternatives of multimedia components, accessibility features and required digital rights management (DRM), media-component locations on the network, and other content characteristics. Using this information, the DASH client selects the appropriate encoded alternative and starts streaming the content by fetching the segments using HTTP GET requests.

After appropriate buffering to allow for network throughput variations, the client continues fetching the subsequent segments and also monitors the network bandwidth fluctuations. Depending on its measurements, the client decides how to adapt to the available bandwidth by fetching segments of different alternatives (with lower or higher bitrates) to maintain an adequate buffer.

The MPEG-DASH specification only defines the MPD and the segment formats. The delivery of the MPD and the media-encoding formats containing the segments, as well as the client behavior for fetching, adaptation heuristics, and playing content, are outside of MPEG-DASH’s scope.

This is where vendors like Microsoft will be able to dedicate engineering talent to providing the best, most efficient DASH streaming solution while content providers can enjoy use of a non-proprietary streaming protocol and file format. For a content provider, you’ll no longer be “locked in” to a specific vendor’s technology solution.

The future

We at Microsoft are very excited about MPEG DASH. We have not yet announced how DASH will be supported in our products but we are the co-Chair of the entire effort, so you can expect us to do some very big things with it. And the great news is that DASH is so similar to our IIS Smooth Streaming technology that making your Smooth Streaming content DASH-compliant will be nearly automatic in the future.

 Further reading

• Streamingmedia.com: What is MPEG DASH?
• DASH Promoter’s Group
• DASHPG: Extensive Overview
• Wikipedia
• Slideshare.net: Overview of DASH

Recognizing the need for more and more of our partners to provide more sophisticated video playback experiences using the HTML5 video tag, we started an effort a few months back to port our Player Framework for Silverlight and Windows Phone over to HTML5. We are excited to announce our first release of this new player framework on playerframework.codeplex.com. In our first release we are focusing on core playback functionality, and robust plugin API, advanced support for fall-back/fall-forward scenarios with our Silverlight player, and TTML captioning support.

The biggest difference that users of our Silverlight player will notice is that there is no support for adaptive streaming. This is due to the lack of a standard for adaptive streaming in the HTML5 spec. Other than Apple, browser vendors have continued to focus on being completely standards-compliant (including IE9!) so we are forced to work within the confines of what the browsers actually support. That said, there is a standards effort underway, led by Microsoft, Apple, and a number of other technology companies, called MPEG DASH. Once that standard has been adopted by the major browsers we will add support for it in this framework. Until then, it’s progressive download only.

If you need a robust player for your HTML5-based content have a look at the Player Framework for HTML5. We continue to invest in improving it and aligning it with the rest of our video player frameworks so our customers can have a consistent, universal framework that allows them to deliver their content to a wide variety of platforms and devices.

And check out or FAQ for more details on the Player Framework for HTML5.

Download it now.

We have just released a new version of the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) and we’ve given it a new name – the Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework (MMPPF). Yes, it’s a bit more difficult to say, and we don’t get to refer to it as the “SMurF” any more, but the new name represents how the framework is now a much more significant component of Microsoft’s media platform.

Over the last few weeks we’ve started to role out a new, umbrella brand for the various media technologies, tools, and frameworks that Microsoft offers. Aligning all of our media projects under the “Microsoft Media Platform” brand allows us to tell a much more comprehensive story about our end-to-end media pipeline. The Microsoft media platform currently comprises IIS media services, and smooth streaming on the server side (all components of Windows Server), Expression Encoder, the MMP video editor, the MMP Content Manager, the MMP Player Framework, and a number of other technologies. However, we’ll be incorporating more tools, frameworks, servers, and services in the future.

MMP Player Framework 2.5

This latest version of the Player Framework, built on Microsoft Silverlight, offers a number of new features and enhancements. One of the most important new features is our addition of stereoscopic 3D support. Now content providers can stream 3D video to consumers using the Player Framework and the Silverlight player. Here’s a video (WMV) demonstrating how to use this new feature.

In this new release we also put a significant amount of effort into developing an advertising plugin. This new plugin adds support for the VPAID, VAST, and MAST (PDF) standards. Check out this video (WMV) to learn how to use it.

Download MMPPF 2.5 here.

New in SMF 2.5

• Stereoscopic 3D support
• Standards based advertising support
• Fixed several bugs
• Uses SSME 1.5 Update 1
• See the downloads pagefor a full, detailed listing of changes in v2.5