IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Beta Released
The long-awaited Beta release of IIS Transform Manager is now available! With this release, we’ve incorporated some great feature requests from a large number of customers who have been running the Alpha release in commercial production for months. In addition to the previous ability to almost instantly convert Smooth Streaming content for use on Apple iOS devices, Transform Manager now also enables you to convert segmented .mp4 files to Smooth Streaming presentations and then apply DRM encryption. Add to this the new ability to scale out across multi-core HPC clusters, plus improved monitoring and management controls, and you have one very high-performance media transform engine at a very low price point.
Features
Here is a quick list of some of the major feature changes:
| Capability | Status |
|---|---|
| Apply Digital Rights Management | New! |
| Apply fine-grained logging controls & log rollover | New! |
| Auditing of all file movements and copies | New! |
| Configure auto-cleanup of Watch Folders | New! |
| Manage credentials on each Watch Folder | New! |
| Monitor Watch Folders via notifications | New! |
| Run as a non-administrator, even after logging off | New! |
| Scale out with multi-core HPC clusters | New! |
| Transmux MP4 files into Smooth Streaming | New! |
| Chain Tasks together to create unique workflows | Improved |
| Convert an existing content library to Smooth Streaming | Improved |
| Create custom tasks using the updated Task API | Improved |
| Maintain constant ingest / transcode rates | Improved |
| Transmux Smooth content for Apple iOS devices | Improved |
| User interfaces, file filtering, overall stability | Improved |
Workflow
Several of the Transform Manager 1.0 Beta features listed above are represented in the workflow diagram for the Expression Encoder 4 task shown in the following figure.
Customer Praise
Many customers find that Transform Manager uniquely addresses their on-demand batch processing needs. Here are two examples…
iStreamPlanet
“We have been using Expression Encoder to edit and transcode assets for the past 2 years. Prior to Transform Manager and HPC, we found the task of managing a large number of concurrent encoding jobs to be challenging. By integrating Transform Manager and HPC into our Video Workflow Automation Platform, iStreamPlanet is able to scale and manage multiple Expression Encoder nodes across multiple servers while also tracking the progress through the entire transcoding cycle from our own CMS.”
Bhavesh Upadhyaya, Vice President of Operations, iStreamPlanet
Twofour Digital
“IIS Transform manager has quickly become a core part of our video services platform ‘MediaFreedom’ and allowed us to quickly get running with complex custom workflows in critical business situations, even in its Alpha and pre-Beta versions. Communication and support from Microsoft has been excellent, and we’ve managed to leverage our existing infrastructure and build a transcode and video processing farm for a fraction of the price of competing solutions. We look forward to growing MediaFreedom alongside this valuable tool of the Microsoft Media Platform.
The plug-in architecture allows us to be flexible and deliver unique solutions to our customers, differentiating ourselves from the competition. Although the bundling of Expression Encoder control into IIS Transform Manager helps us get off the ground in record time, we appreciate the vendor-neutral aspect of Transform Manager, allowing us to be confident in our capital investments and their longevity.
The compute clustering capabilities of IIS Transform Manager allows us to scale our solutions according to our needs, and have a single point of configuration. The lack of a homogeneity requirement also allows us to scale down and redistribute our hardware when the time comes.”
Iain Ballard, Senior Developer, Twofour Digital
Resources
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Beta, 32-bit download
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Beta, 64-bit download
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Beta Readme File