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It’s been a while since I updated the blog, so I will take this opportunity to bring everyone up to speed on the more recent Microsoft Media Platform product updates: November 9, 2011 Player Framework version 1.0 for HTML5 is released to Codeplex. Download it here . This new player framework implements basic video playback functionality using the HTML5 Video tag, and features JavaScript API and control UI consistent with the Silverlight version of the Player Framework. For a complete list of...( read more ) Read More...
When it comes to adaptive bit rate streaming over HTTP, file format really does matter. The Fragmented MP4 (fMP4) file format, first used by Microsoft, is the basis of IIS Smooth Streaming, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming, and two industry streaming standards. fMP4 files have some distinct advantages over adaptive streaming solutions based on MPEG-2 Transport Streams, such as the proprietary HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format developed by Apple. HLS is based on a derivative of the MPEG-2 Transport Stream (M2TS), which was developed nearly two decades ago for broadcast TV. On the other hand, the fMP4 file format was specifically designed to address the needs of modern streaming to computers, televisions, and mobile devices. fMP4 offers a number of key benefits over M2TS solutions, such as: Trick-play capabilities (e.g., fast-forward, pause, instant replay) Seamless stream adaptation to local conditions Reduced storage requirements Backwards compatibility with M2TS-based solutions Integrated digital...
This is another blog post that has been long due. I’ve written a lot about Live Smooth Streaming in my past blog posts but so far very few on On-Demand Smooth Streaming. Well, partially because getting On-Demand Smooth Streaming to work is quite simple. You just need to copy your content to the server and then everything should just work. For low volume usage, that’s pretty much all you need to care about. But if you are doing serious production systems with a large content library and significant client traffic, you would want to tune the system to its best performance in which case this blog post should be helpful to you. 1. Overview First let’s take a quick look at what’s the typical server logic when serving On-Demand Smooth Streaming requests: Figure 1. On-Demand Smooth Streaming Server Data Flow Client issues a request to get the client manifest (.ISMC file in the diagram). From the manifest file, client figures out which bitrate and timestamp it wants to request from the server....
We just released IIS Media Services 4.1 that adds support for REST services API's for management of publishing points as well as performance improvements for both on demand and live scenarios. Read more from here . Read More...
A new release of IIS Media Services is available that adds support for REST services API's for management of publishing points as well as performance improvements for both on demand and live scenarios. Full details on how to take advantage of the performance improvements will be detailed in a later blog post. Capabilities supported via the REST services include the following: Creation & deletion of publishing points Enumeration of all web site publishing points Querying and updating publishing point settings and state Querying publishing point statistics See MSDN for full documentation on these API's. Expression Encoder 4 SP2 which was just released last week makes use of the REST API's supported in IIS Media Services 4.1 so that one can easily manage publishing points directly from within Expression Encoder. From a Live Broadcasting Project you can now: Create a new publishing point When the name for a new publishing point is specified, Expression Encoder now provides a...
Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Expression Encoder 4 was released today, and comes with some great updates. For example, SP2 adds the ability to do GPU encoding with Intel Sandy Bridge processors, and there are new multi-channel audio options including AAC and SRS support. For live scenarios, you can now control IIS Smooth Streaming publishing points from Expression Encoder. There have also been improvements in screen capture encoding, the built-in player templates, and new SDK samples to help you get started faster with building encoding applications. There are over 300 improvements and fixes in SP2. Get more detailed information on the Expression Encoder team blog. Read More...
The newly released Microsoft Media Platform Content Manager pulls together an end-to-end video workflow that allows you to create live streaming events, transcode on-demand content, manage and publish video, edit video, and insert mid-roll advertisements. This open-source release can be used by enterprises, educational institutions, and broadcasting companies to manage their video assets using a lightweight and highly-customizable solution built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Media Platform (MMP) technologies, including Silverlight 4, IIS Media Services 4.0, and Expression Encoder 4. The MMP Content Manager is one of four MMP frameworks optimized around IIS Smooth Streaming and its open-specification adaptive streaming file format, known as PIFF (the Protected Interoperable File Format , adopted by the likes of Ultraviolet and Netflix ). It greatly simplifies the workflow for complex video streaming events, such as PDC 2010 and the types shown on the IIS Media Case Studies page...
Technorati Tags: Transform Manager , Media , Smooth Streaming With the latest release of the IIS Transform Manager Beta, we added a new “task” and Job Template to convert from standard MP4 files (non-fragmented) to Smooth Streaming format files (fragmented MP4). The benefit of this new task is that you can use a lot of existing encoders on the marketplace that allow you to generate regular MP4 files and then easily convert those to Smooth Streaming format for delivery in IIS Media services 4.0. To use the new MP4 to Smooth Task you need to start out with a set of multi-bitrate encoded MP4 files that meet the requirements for Smooth Streaming encoding: That means you can use your favorite encoder that can generate H264 and AAC MP4 files (there are a lot of those out there!) as long as you make sure to set them up to create GOP aligned (or Coded Video Sequence aligned for you fellow video nerds) files. To do that you need to stick to some advanced settings in your H264 encoding...
I’m very excited to announce the release of IIS Media Service 4.0! Some of the major features that we are anxious to share this week at the Streaming Media West conference include: Encode once and stream to Silverlight, WP7, iPad, iPhone, Xbox. Live Smooth Streaming updates: o Stability : Improved stability and memory usage of Live Smooth Streaming under heavy server loads. o Low Latency: Deliver near real-time broadcasts to Silverlight desktop clients. This feature is key for financial news customers, surveillance, e-learning, and on-line gaming (gambling) sites. o New Publishing Point Details UI: Real-time publishing point statistics now available in the IIS Manager UI. o Manifest Compression: Compress live-streaming manifests down to only a few lines to improve delivery of live 24/7 television for over-the-top services. o Updated RSCA API: Real-time statistics available via RSCA API. (Blog post detailing this feature coming soon!) o Metadata...
Today is the start of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) 2010, and you can view it now – live or on-demand – at www.microsoftpdc.com . Powering the streaming at PDC is IIS Smooth Streaming, part of IIS Media Services . As usual, there will be plenty of big announcements at PDC, including new information about Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure. Two announcements, made by Bob Muglia during the keynote (see http://bit.ly/VMonAzure and http://bit.ly/IISonAzure , respectively), affect IIS Media Services: Windows Azure will soon support a VM role so you can run a full Windows Server 2008 R2 image Full IIS and IIS Smooth Streaming support will soon be enabled natively on Azure! With this year's event, we have taken the media experience up another level. Not only are we providing live Smooth Streaming of the keynotes, but also concurrent live streaming of all sessions. All of this content will be available for on-demand viewing after the live event ends. The player experience...
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