Search results matching tag 'IIS Media Pack'

RTW of Live Smooth Streaming is now… Live.

jboch — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:22:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce that IIS Media Services 3.0, which includes the RTW of Live Smooth Streaming is now available for download (WebPI, x86, x64). This release builds on the Beta’s functionality that delivered:

Smooth bit-rate switching that provides your users the best possible quality at that moment in time
Massive scalability through the use of cacheable HTTP
Integrated Network DVR

The team has been hard at work since the Beta making the product better. So what’s new in RTW? Here are the highlights...

High Availability – multi-tier scalability and failover
24/7 and long-running event support
Ad insertion support

Try it out today by following the steps in one of the following walkthroughs:

You can also download the new Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide for a step-by-step description of the encoding, server, and client set up for Smooth Streaming in a single document. Finally, don’t forget to check out the IIS Media Services Showcase, which gives a visual overview of the IIS Smooth Streaming deployments to date and a flavor for the kinds of experiences they delivered to users.

Please don’t hesitate to provide feedback on this release. Look forward to hearing about your experience…

IIS Media Services 2.0, Smooth Streaming is RTW!

jboch — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:53:39 GMT

Today marks the start of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, and we brought our “A” game with a press release announcing the immediate availability of IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW (WebPI, x86, x64), including the first full production release of Smooth Streaming. You can try the experience for yourself on iis.net, and learn more on the media landing page.

We are also pleased to have a key group of encoding ISVs announcing Smooth Streaming support with us, including Digital Rapids, Envivio Inc., Grab Networks Inc. (Anystream), Inlet Technologies, Rhozet, Telestream Inc., VBrick Systems Inc., ViewCast Corp. and Winnov Inc. This gives our customers lots of great choices for encoding compatible content and integrating Smooth Streaming delivery with their existing workflows. If you’re at NAB, come by the Microsoft booth to see demos of On-Demand and Live Smooth Streaming, including Live streams protected by PlayReady encryption.

There are two releases available side-by-side on iis.net and through the Web Platform Installer:

IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW – the production-ready release announced today. Includes:

Smooth Streaming
Bitrate Throttling
Web Playlists

IIS Media Services 3.0 Beta – a preview of new features in 3.0 made available in March at MIX. Includes:

Live Smooth Streaming
Advanced Logging

For production deployments, you’ll want to use the 2.0 RTW, but if you are looking to try the full range of functionality available, get them both! And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to use this feedback thread, or start a new one for your specific question.

I will post more in depth on the technology, common questions, and couple of interesting scenarios in the coming weeks…

Live Smooth Streaming: Try It Now, No Encoder Required

jboch — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:30:45 GMT

Announced at the MIX09 keynote, Live Smooth Streaming was released for download (WebPI, x86, x64) on Wednesday. You don’t need a live encoder to try this at home. Read below for the how…

What is Live Smooth Streaming?

Live Smooth Streaming provides the same great user experience as its Video On-Demand counterpart, using the same scalable delivery method that takes full advantage of commodity HTTP caches. In short, a user experience that…

Starts playback and seeks instantly
Does not stop to buffer
Deliver the best quality your bandwidth and CPU allow at the moment

Live Smooth Streaming archives incoming data and provides a full Network Digital Video Recorder (DVR). It works just like a TiVo for online video, with support for replay, pause, and jumping back to the live broadcast. If you start watching a broadcast late, you can always jump back to see what you missed, and then resume watching the live broadcast.

How can I try Live Smooth Streaming?

See the “Getting Started” walkthrough for detailed instructions. In a nutshell the steps are:

Install and configure the Live Smooth Streaming Beta (WebPI, x86, x64)
Install the sample content (Big Buck Bunny) and the Live Smooth Streaming Starter Kit
Simulate the Live broadcast using the pushencoder Tool

Open a browser and enjoy the experience. The pushencoder tool in the Starter Kit also allows you to simulate a live broadcast from any Smooth Streaming assets you have created with Expression Encoder. From a command line, simply supply the URL of the publishing and the path to the .ism file for your asset with a command like:

pushencoder64 <url-of-publishingpoint> <ism-file>

Can the Beta really do Live broadcasts?

Yes! At Thursday’s IIS Media Services session MIX09, we (IIS and Inlet) had a lot of fun pulling back the curtain on an end-to-end broadcast setup including an uncompressed signal source, encoders, server, and client. You can watch the recording of the session online (seek to 60:00 for the Live Smooth Streaming demo) at:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T56F

Where can I learn more?

Check out the IIS Media Services page, the Live Smooth Streaming feature page, and the walkthrough on “Creating and Managing Publishing Points”. Please feel free leave any questions you may have as comments, and I will gladly address them in a future post.

On behalf of the entire team, it’s our pleasure to make the Beta available for download. We’d love to hear about your experience and any feedback you may have.

--John

Live Smooth Streaming Beta, Inlet's encoder, and the 2010 Winter Olympics

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:03:00 GMT

Live Smooth Streaming

Lots is going on at MIX, so as not to overwhelm with too many posts, I’ll try to triple-dip on this one.

First, as part of Scott Guthrie’s keynote yesterday (now with transcript), we announced that live streaming is coming for Smooth Streaming. The key advantages of Smooth Streaming are as applicable to live video as on-demand. And for high volume live events where scalability concerns can force users into “waiting rooms” or a lower tier of service, the offered scalability may be even more important yet. In particular, my personal take on the killer aspects of live streaming are:

Seamless adaptive bandwidth switching

With on-demand content, particular shorter duration, you can let users with slow connections buffer a while and then play. But live is live; if you’re offering just a 1000 Kbps stream, a user isn’t going to get a decent experience if the the bandwidth available to the player drops to 800 Kbps for more than a couple of seconds. And even someone with a 5 Mbps connection may see that shared between multiple users and computers, and may have multiple bandwidth-consuming apps running at the same time; it’s a lot to ask that the bandwidth NEVER drops below 1000 Kbps for the duration of a long event. Thus, the managed code heuristics module running inside the Silverlight client can continuously measure available CPU speed, bandwidth, and even window size, and then give the user the best content they can use at that moment. And it can seamlessly switch without any pause in the video or “buffering” message to a lower stream if needed or a higher stream if usable.

My hope is that this can break live streaming out of the lowest common denominators used to maximize availability. With Smooth Streaming we can offer fallback rates down to the minimum experience appropriate for the content, and as high a rate as the content justifies, with each user getting the best experience they can get at the moment. I hope this can make consumer HD streaming a reality for a lot of viewers.

SmoothHD.com is a great demo of the seamless stream switching for on-demand; the live experience will be essentially identical.

Leveraging scalability of the web via proxy caching

In Alex Zambelli’s formulation, Smooth Streaming “adapts video to the web, instead of trying to adapt the web to video.” The content is delivered in a series of small files each containing a few seconds of video and audio. And each copy of each chunk has the same URL, so proxy caches handle this automatically. So all the CDNs (like our launch partner Akamai) with great web delivery technology are able to immediately leverage their huge network of proxy edge servers with Smooth Streaming. Moreso, all the ISPs and organizations with proxy servers (and that’s most of them) can have multiple people watching the same content with only a single copy of each chunk having to be sent to the proxy. So those horror stories about a company’s internet connection being brought to its knees by everyone watching the Olympics or March Madness at the same time? We think we’ve done a lot to make that much less of a problem, since the more popular the content, the more scalability it gets through the proxy caching. Hopefully this can make the waiting room a thing of the past.

There’s plenty of additional tuning the CDNs and others can do to further improve caching for Smooth Streaming specifically, but it gets a huge boost automatically by leveraging the existing infrastructure of the web.

Live PVR

Since on-demand Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, and live Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, we’ve eliminated the hard line between a live broadcast and the on-demand version of it that used to need to be published several hours later. Instead, what’s live is just the latest chunk that’s available, but every chunk is still there (and likely still in the proxy cache). So that means you can pause, rewind, skip to the beginning, skip back to live, all during the live stream. Think of it as a PVR in the cloud.

And it’s already in beta

Better yet, we’ve already got a public beta of it for download! It requires IIS 7.0, running on either Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 (you can play with it without installing 2008).

It can be installed via our cool new Web Platform Installer as well as traditional .msi files.

The package also includes a "simulated live encoder" which loops out the bits from a local file to the server just like an encoder would do. This enables server and player development, testing, and configuration without having to actually run a live encoder 24/7.

We also have a new IIS Media Services portal with information about all the IIS media delivery technologies. There’s a nice overview about the platform as well.

Inlet’s Live Smooth Streaming encoder

As part of the announcement, Inlet also announced they’ll be the first to market with 3rd party Smooth Streaming encoding, support on-demand in Armada and (in a live demo!) Live in Spinnaker. We’ve got lots of Windows Media and Silverlight customers using Spinnakers with great satisfaction already, so adding Live Smooth is going to be a great upgrade.

Inlet’s John Bishop is presenting along with IIS’s John Bocharov at MIX as I type this in fact. There should be more details about their encoders, and the on-demand version of the session should be available by tomorrow. Here’s the details for finding it in the archives easier.

Delivering Media with Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) Media Services and Microsoft Silverlight MIX09-T56F

By: John Bishop, John Bocharov Tags: Media | Servers

See how to deliver media with the best user experience in a cost-effective, scalable, and highly manageable way. Learn how to expand your reach and improve quality using Smooth Streaming, how to save on bandwidth, and how to maintain control when using Progressive Download. Understand how IIS Media Services and WMS light up the media ecosystem from encoding to playback.

Others have noted we’re racing along at un-Microsoft speeds with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. It’s only six months since we shipped Silverlight 2 and we’re already at Silverlight 3 beta. And Smooth Streaming wasn’t even announced then and we’ve already got on-demand and live servers in beta. But hey, this is the internet, and that’s how fast we have to go.

And of course this is only possible with the great foundations of technologies like Windows Media, .NET, IIS, and Windows. And at least as important, with the great partners like Inlet we’ve been working with for years. We’re all really excited about what’s possible here, and pushing to get it out there so people can use it quickly. We’ve known what video on the web could become for more than a decade now, and it feels like we’ve finally entered that last lap toward the finish line.

And a great event to be focusing on would be…

Live Smooth Streaming for the 2010 Winter Olympics

It seems like I’m only just now catching up on my sleep from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, but the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are less than 11 months away (staring.

And yesterday, as part of Scott’s keynote, Perkins Miller (senior vice president, Digital Media, for NBC Universal Sports and Olympics) announced we’ll be doing Vancouver with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. And building on the Bejing experience with 720p HD and much deeper interactivity and information. His whole comments are great, including some interesting numbers about Beijing viewership and NBCU’s vision for the 2010 experience . I’ll just close out this already long post quoting his section from the transcript:

PERKINS MILLER: Thank you, Scott.

Hello, everybody! I was here about one year ago at this time, in fact, as we were preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. How many people here watched some of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, those phenomenal athletes? (Applause.) I mean, it was just incredible. I mean, it was the single largest viewed audience that we had on television in history. It was also the single largest digital event in history. And we did that in partnership with Scott's team here, with the Silverlight group.

It was phenomenal. We did more than 50 million unique visitors, more than 1.3 billion page views. We streamed more than 70 million clips in the 17-day period of time. We served up 10 million hours of video.

And critically we served up 5,000 individual clips for consumers each and every day of the second week of the Olympics.

And what that really showed us is that the long tail really works. People in their desk, in their houses wanted to go watch rowing, wanted to go watch beach volleyball, wanted to watch all these sports at their time, at their leisure, and we enabled them to do it. It was an absolutely phenomenal partnership.

It really worked out well for us on the commercial side supporting all our interests. We were able to show for people who went to NBCOlympics.com and watched video and consumed content there, when they went back to watching their television, they watched twice as much television. Think about that, twice as much television for people who went and used a digital platform. It really brought to life the fact that we need to deliver as a media company a full 360-degree experience to our customers.

In addition, the people who watched video online during the time, if they were in the office or at their house, those folks who went and used the enhanced experience – you're seeing some of the examples here on the screen – these people who watched the enhanced experience like picture-in-picture, being able to watch four live feeds simultaneously, they watched three times as much video as those people who just chose to watch a single stream or a less enhanced experience.

What that told us is if we deliver a higher-quality experience, if we deliver something that's going to engage the audience, they will watch more. They will be more engaged by our product, and they will ultimately serve as a better audience to our product. So, it was really a tremendous experience.

Now, who knows, how many people can tell me where the next Olympics are? Anybody? OK, I didn't hear anything. Oh, come on, Vancouver, 2010. It's the winter Olympics. It was kind of a trick question; there are summer and winter games. So, the next Olympics are in Vancouver, Canada. They're roughly a year from now.

And I'm here to announce for the first time a renewal of our partnership with Silverlight. They will be providing the enhanced online video coverage for NBC's coverage of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. (Cheers, applause.)

And I am truly honored to be out here today because Scott's team has just done a phenomenal job coming up with what we think is going to be the ultimate product for a video event online. We're going to be streaming the Olympics fully in HD. This is going to be an adaptive, Smooth Streaming event, full 720p.

So, when you walk out of your house in the morning, and you go to your office, and you've left your beautiful 52-inch HD television at home, and you sit down at your desk and you want to grab some video from the Olympics that day, it's going to mirror that experience. We're going to be able to deliver you that continuous, high quality experience that you expect now as a consumer.

In addition, we're going to be able to bring you the DVR experience that you expect. So, just as Scott was illustrating earlier, you'll be able to pause the live stream, you'll be able to rewind the live stream, you'll even be able to go slow motion. So, for those of you who have been following the World Cup skiing this winter, there's a woman by the name of Lindsey Vonn who absolutely lit the world on fire. She won the World Cup overall. She is skiing phenomenally well. And if you want to see her fly off a 150-foot jump in the Vancouver Olympics – 50 meters for those from Canada – you'll be able to watch here in slow-mo online land those jumps and go through to the finish line.

We'll also be able to deliver to you full metadata overlays. What this means is that we'll be able to take the live results, the athlete biographies, the country information, all the information that gives you the kind of context for when the Olympics is, and deliver it to you as part of the enhanced Olympics experience. So, if you don't know who Lindsey Vonn is, you'll be able to find out who she is.

In addition, we've found that when you're watching the Olympics, and when you're trying to be engaged in this event, it's all-consuming. People want to know what's happening, when it's happening, and they want to consume the content where they are, whenever they are. This means that live video alerts are going to be critical. And for these games we'll deliver you not only live video alerts, we'll be able to give you real time feeds of those alerts. So, if you signed up to get the most popular clip of that moment, we'll deliver that to you. And again it will come through, depending on your platform, as a full HD experience.

Finally, because we need to commercialize this, for those of you that know the sports business, we do need to find ways to bring our partners to the table. We have the ability this time to do live ad insertion with our live streams. This functionality is going to be critical to give you as a consumer a fairly seamless experience, still be able to enjoy the live event, but allow our commercial partners access in order to find a way to associate with this great event that we'll be putting on together.

So, I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm thrilled to be here, I'm thrilled to be working with Scott's team. We have 331 days to go to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and I hope you all watch, and thanks very much. (Applause.)

In closing, I’d like to add my own (Applause) as well. Great stuff.

Although it’s only 329 days now. Back to work…

Beta Release of Smooth Streaming Now Available

jboch — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:15:10 GMT

It is my pleasure to announce that the Smooth Streaming Beta is now available. Get it here for x86, x64, or using the Web Platform Installer (see below for details). In case you’re hearing about Smooth Streaming for the first time here... the technology adapts the bit rate of the content in throughout playback to provide your viewers with an experience that starts up instantly, seeks instantly, and delivers the best quality that network and CPU conditions will allow for any point in time. It does this while communicating using fully cacheable requests and responses, so that the power of massive HTTP caching infrastructures can provide your viewers with the best Quality of Service. Check out the extension page, the initial post, or Smooth HD to learn more.

To make it easier to get started with Smooth Streaming, we will be releasing a package of sample content imminently. This package contains a test client that simulates changes in network conditions, and shows the history of bit rate and frame rate changes to make it easy to visualize how the experience evolves over time:

You can also deploy any content created for IIS Smooth Streaming using Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 and start streaming. There are several walkthroughs available to make it easy to get started with the functionality in this release:

Getting Started – setting up your IIS Smooth Streaming server and deploying sample content
Exploring Bit Rate Changes – using the User Experience Simulator (shown above)
Managing Your Presentations – using the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager to manage your content

We’d love to hear your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try the release first-hand: use this link to tell us what you think. On behalf of the entire Smooth Streaming team, we’re really excited to make this Beta broadly available, and look forward to your feedback!

--John

The Web Platform Installer is a great new way to get the web server (including your favorite IIS Extensions), database, and application framework in one simple operation. To get Smooth Streaming, be sure to select either the “Complete” install, or check “IIS Smooth Streaming Beta” if selecting “Your Choice”:

Smooth Streaming Questions? We’ve Got Answers!

jboch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:56:08 GMT

Since we announced Smooth Streaming in October, the team has been hard at work preparing the feature for broad public release (the answer to the obvious question of “When?” is “Very soon!”... please stay tuned for details) and addressing feedback from customers in the early adoption program. But, of course, the Web (and especially the blogosphere) never stands still:

RunAs Radio produced a podcast focused on Smooth Streaming and, more generally, streaming media (thanks to Richard and Greg for kindly inviting me to be on their show)
Chris Knowlton highlights Smooth Streaming customer questions and the answers provided by Ben Waggoner and Alex Zambelli in a downright encyclopedic set of blog posts
Updates to SmoothHD.com site that should reduce bandwidth utilized when the window is too small to see a higher quality picture from a higher bit rate
Some interesting questions on my initial post, addressed below…

And although this last topic is not about Smooth Streaming as such, it highlighted one of the needs the technology fulfills. Coverage of the U.S. Presidential Inauguration drove traffic records across the Web and set a new bar for customer expectations. However, the day also caused frustration and demonstrated the challenges of scaling to the size of the audience, as captured in The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us. When we demo Smooth Streaming, the end-user experience is the first thing people notice, but scale is where the technology truly gets its opportunity to shine. It never ceases to amaze me how massive (and massively distributed) the Web’s HTTP delivery infrastructures really are. With Smooth Streaming, we are betting that the way to reach the growing audience is to integrate video delivery into these infrastructures, rather than trying to scale out the comparatively far smaller parallel networks for streaming.

My last post sparked a couple of interesting questions that merit some clarification:

How does Smooth Streaming relate to what Move Networks is doing? From my perspective, what we offer with Smooth Streaming is a platform technology while Move Networks is a one-stop-shop service solution provider that innovates on the Silverlight platform. So I would not view this as a competing offering – the intent is to create a vibrant ecosystem of great services for streaming media to Silverlight, in which Move Networks continues and will continue to be a strong and well-respected player.
How does Smooth Streaming relate to Windows Media multiple bit rate (WM-MBR) technology? WM-MBR focused on the challenge of simplifying delivery to client that may have differing “last-mile” connection speeds, and provided a format that allowed all the bitrates to reside in a single file, along with a client and server that negotiate the delivery bit rate. Smooth Streaming addresses a similar challenge and several others:

The Last Mile: Smooth Streaming takes the bit rate switching concept a step further by making the switches seamless, and adjusting the bit rate every few seconds as needed to ensure the optimal experience.
Scaling Out for Global Delivery: Smooth Streaming addresses this by making the media communication HTTP-cacheable, accomplished by fragmenting the media into independently decodable units for transport. We chose a format that enables the server to fragment the media in an efficient and scalable fashion, but unfortunately fragmentation that is not a scenario WM-MBR was designed for.
Future-Proofing the Algorithms: By leveraging managing code in Silverlight to host the bit rate decision algorithms, Smooth Streaming makes it easy to evolve these algorithms over time, customize them for a content library, and optimize them for a specific delivery network, all without changes to the client runtime.

Windows Media Services will continue to offer first-class support for WM-MBR streaming to Windows Media Player, and we’ll look to provide migration tools from existing formats in response to customer demand.

Hope this helps, and of course I’m looking forward to getting more great questions when the bits are public.

--John

Smooth Streaming – What, Why, When, Where, and How

chriskno — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:48:00 GMT

Since we announced our new IIS Smooth Streaming extension last October with Akamai, we've been spending a lot of time engaging with very-interested customers and partners. In the course of these discussions, we hear a lot of frequently asked questions about Smooth Streaming, usually along these lines:

What is Smooth Streaming?
Can I use my existing Windows Media content with Smooth Streaming?
How is Smooth Streaming different from MBR [multiple-bit-rate] streaming?
Will Smooth Streaming work with Silverlight?
Is Smooth Streaming based on traditional streaming, or progressive download?
Does Smooth Streaming use proprietary streaming protocols?
Why is Microsoft shifting towards standards-based media delivery?
How do I create Smooth Streaming content?
Do I need to set up Windows Media Services to use Smooth Streaming?
What kind of support will Smooth Streaming have for H.264 content?
How does Smooth Streaming work?
Is Smooth Streaming more scalable than traditional streaming?
Are there cost advantages to using Smooth Streaming?

If you are wondering about the answers to any or all of these questions, then I highly recommend you read a new four-part Smooth Streaming blog series by Alex Zambelli, Microsoft technical evangelist. Topics include (in order):

A Brief History of Multi-Bitrate Streaming
The Birth of Smooth Streaming
Smooth Streaming Architecture
Encoding for Smooth Streaming (coming soon!)

If you haven't already done so, please check out the proof-of-concept Smooth Streaming site at SmoothHD.com.

-Chris

Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 – Intro and Multibitrate Encoding

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:17:00 GMT

Oh, I’m a bad, bad blogger. The Expression Encoder Service Pack 1 has been out for MONTHS, and and it’s cool enough that I haven’t had the time to do it full justice. Oh well, better short than nothing; I’ll just start off with the biggest new feature: multibitrate encoding, including support for Smooth Streaming.

First, install it already! It can be downloaded here, and probably most of you picked it up via Microsoft Update by now. James Clarke had a great overview blog post about it which I recommend.

This first post I’m going to focus on Smooth Streaming and multibitrate streaming in general.

“Adaptive Streaming” and Smooth Streaming

Here’s the big one: Expression Encoder can now do multibitrate encoding. Alex Zambelli has a good history of the technology.

When doing multibitrate encoding, EE does multiple simultaneous encodes from the same source file. While the big driver for that feature is Smooth Streaming (another overdue blog topic), we also support encoding a single multiplexed “Intelligent Steaming” WMV file or individual WMV files for each bitrate.

SmoothHD.com

And If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over to the SmoothHD.com demo site we do with Akamai’s and check out the technology in practice. And yes, all those files were encoded with SP1.

SmoothHD.com in action. Those bars in the lower right show which data rate band you’re getting; mouse over for more details. Click on it to bring up a diagnostic menu and play around with scaling. And boy, that 20 Mbps DSL upgrade I’ve got on order can’t come soon enough!

Previewing Smooth Streaming with Expression Encoder

So, you want to play around with Smooth Streaming, but don’t want to have to upload your files to Akamai every time you want to do a quality check? Fair enough, but we don’t have media players that support the Fragmented MPEG-4 format used in .ismv files yet. Fortunately, EEv2 SP1 also includes a little localhost Smooth Streaming web server built into it. If you encode to a Silverlight 2 template and make sure that “Preview in Browser” is checked, you’ll get Smooth Streaming working, heuristics and all! It’s only on the local machine, and only when EE is running, but it’s a start.

To preview the video quality of Smooth Streaming, you can also make individual WMV files and watch them as normal. The output bitstreams are identical no matter what the file is wrapped in.

WMSnoop remains a great (and free) way to check out the GOP structure of WMV files. Below (click to zoom) you can see how Smooth Streaming produces a rock-solid cadence of a keyframe (in yellow) every 60 frames, while still being able to insert extra keyframes as needed for high quality scene changes.

Encoding for Multibitrate

Unlike the old FSDK-based MBR encoder, each stream is encoded in its own thread, which means a whole lot of cores can be saturated; my 8-core typically is running at nearly 100%, and if HD is involved, a 16-core would as well. The limiting factor can wind up being the speed of the source decoder past a certain point. Here’s a pretty typical load I’ll see when running from a Lagarith source file.

Multibitrate Video Options

Most of the parameters must be identical per stream; only frame size and bitrate can vary each. Other parameters like frame rate, audio, and codec settings are fixed. This is to facilitate Smooth Streaming by making sure that I-frames appear at the same point in each output stream. For technical reasons with the current VC-1 SDK, this also means only 1-pass CBR is supported for multibitrate encoding.

Multibitrate Audio Options

Only one audio option can be selected when doing Adaptive Streaming encoding. This isn’t the limitation it would have been in the WMA days, as WMA 10 Pro’s low bitrate audio quality is so good. We find 64 Kbps provides great quality for most content, and fits into most web delivery bitrates.

Multibitrate Container Options

There are three container choices

ASF Single File. This gives you one WMV file for each video data rate, each including its own copy of the audio. This is an easy way to make multiple versions of the same source file.
ASF Multiple File. This gives a single WMV file containing all copies of the video and one copy of the audio, ala Intelligent Streaming. This provides bitrate switching when used on Windows Media Services.
IIS Smooth Streaming. This is for use with the forthcoming IIS Media Pack version that enables Smooth Streaming. To use this today, you’ll need to be part of Akamai’s beta program. That gives one output file per stream. There’s no way at the moment to play these files easily on the desktop, as they use the Fragmented MPEG-4 file format, which isn’t broadly supported in media player software; it’s mainly used inside of set top boxes like a TiVo.

Multibitrate Advanced Codec Settings

There’s a few required settings to get optimal Smooth Streaming compatible content in EEv2SP1. Smooth Streaming requires that all bitrates start have Closed GOPs (Group of Pictures – a keyframe and all the frames that reference it) starting on the same frame every few (typically 2) seconds. This means that the decoder gets a continuous sequence of frames to decode without any overlaps or missing frames, and without having to run two simultaneous decoders. These are compatible with (but not needed for) ASF, and using them gives the option to remux to Smooth Streaming at a future date.

Maximum QP=31. This is a new feature in SP1, which specifies the maximum allowed Quantization Parameter that can be used. This is similar to the old WME “Smoothness” control which determines the tradeoff between preserving image quality versus frame rate. We’re trying to avoid a frame getting dropped in one data rate but not another, which could throw off GOP alignment. QP 31 is the most compressed a frame can be in VC-1, thus minimizing the chance of a skipped frame.
Adaptive GOP=Off. Adaptive GOP tells the codec that it can “reset” the Key Frame Interval, making it into really “keyframe at least every.” That improves efficiency, but makes it possible that the different output bitrates might wind up starting new GOPs at different times, without any mechanism to resync them. When Adaptive GOP=Off, it’ll still insert an I-frame where appropriate to optimize quality, mainly when there’s a video cut in the middle of a GOP.
Closed GOP=On. In a Closed GOP, the first frame of the GOP is always an I-frame (keyframe), and no frame in the GOP references any other GOP. That makes each GOP fully self-contained, as required for Smooth Streaming. If Closed GOP were off (Open GOP), B-frames can reference frames in other GOPs. This helps efficiency a little bit, but means you always need to have decoded most of the previous GOP to play the first frame of the current one. Even if Closed GOP=On, any additional I-frames inserted due to scene changes may be an Open GOP for improved efficiency.
Output Mode: Elementary Stream Sequence Header. With an Elementary Stream Sequence Header, the VC-1 bitstream includes all the data the decoder needs to play back the chunk of video in that chunk. It’s required (and it’s a tiny bit of data; there’s no downside to using it).
Insert Skipped Frames=On. With Skipped Frames, a frame doesn’t get encoded due to exceeding the Max QP or because it’s just a static frame without motion, consist of just a flag indicating “I’m the same as the frame before.” If Skipped Frames=Off, the frame before the dropped frame has its duration extended to cover the missing frame(s). The actual video playback is identical in either case; but this ensures dropped frames don’t cause a GOP misalignment. There’s no real downside to using this for all files, Smooth Streaming or not.

Tips for multibitrate encoding

General Codec tweaks

These are the changes I made from the Adaptive Streaming default, implementing the typical “make it look good” settings I recommend for EE in general also apply to multibitrate compression. Just don’t mess with the settings up above!

Always On recommendations

These settings won’t have much impact on encode time, but can help quality significantly, particularly with

Adaptive Dead Zone=Conservative . This tells the codec to bias toward softness over blockiness as a frame gets more compressed.
Overlap=On. The Overlap filter softens the edges of blocks, reducing blocking and artifacts at higher compression rates. Web delivery is almost always at rates where the Overlap filter helps quality.
Scene Change Detection=On. Scene Change Detection tells the codec to buffer ahead 16 frames to look for fades, flashes, and scene changes, and dynamically change the frame type based on that. This particularly helps with fades to/from black, and with flash frames (think raves and gunfights). While it can insert an I-frame, it won’t disrupt the pattern locked in by having Adaptive GOP=Off. Scene Change Detection never hurts quality, and often helps. Scene Change Detection maps to the Lookahead parameter used in the Format SDK.
Search Range=Adaptive. Lets the codec dynamically adjust the search range based on the amount of motion in the content. Helps quality a lot when there’s more than 64 pixels horizontally or 32 pixels vertically of motion between two P-frames, without spending CPU cycles on frames with more sedate motion.

Quality over Speed recommendations

These are settings I use when I’m more worried about optimum quality than the speed of encode.

Complexity=4. Complexity controls how hard the codec works on each frame, particularly the precision and thoroughness of looking at motion from frame to frame. Complexity 3 is a great default, since it provides most of the value of 4 and 5 at a higher speed; quality drops of quickly as you go to 2 on down. But 4 is a little better yet, particularly with complex motion like particle effects. Complexity 5 is overkill most of the time, but I wind up using it sometimes when I’m feeling more fussy than rushed, “just in case.”
Chroma Search=Full True Chroma. Chroma Search looks for where the chroma (color) of the image changes differently that its luma (brightness).. This is particularly helpful with motion graphics and animation. Chroma is only a third of the data in the encode, so a full precision chroma search doesn’t add all that much to the encoding time, and with the right content can really help squeeze things down.
Match Method: Adaptive. This switches between using Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) and Hadamard motion matching on a per-macroblock basis. Don’t sweat what that means too much; just know it’s slower and a little faster than the default SAD-only. Full Hadamard is slower yet and sometimes lower quality than Adaptive.

Stretch, not Letterbox

Expression Encoder defaults to letterboxing to be used when the output frame size doesn’t match the source aspect ratio. However, even a slight variation in output aspect ratio from the source’s (typically to get the encoded height and width divisible by 16, the most efficient option) can result in a thin black line of letterboxing (top and bottom) or pillarboxing (left and right). If Resize Mode=Stretch and Mode=Profile Adaptive, Profile Adaptive will get the output frame size in the right ballpark while Stretch adjusts the video slightly to avoid those darn black lines. To make sure the output aspect ratio really is perfect, you can set the Video Aspect to that of the source, and on playback it’ll stretch the image pack to the exact original frame size and shape. Leaving it at the default of Square Pixel generally looks fine as well.

Note that you may need to reapply the Profile Adaptive setting if you apply a job preset to multiple files at once. That can reset to Mode to Custom.

Integer Framerates

By default, Adaptive Streaming profiles gives a keyframe every 2 seconds. However, that’s a precise 2.0000 seconds. So, if your source is a typical NTSC frame rate like 29.97 or 23.976, you’re 0.1% short of 30 and 24 frames a second, and so wind up getting a keyframe every 47 or 59 frames, not the 48 or 60 you might expect. If you set the frame rate to the whole number equivalent, the encode will actually maintain the source frame rate correctly (the value serves as an upper bound, but EE won’t insert duplicate frames when set higher than the source). But it will round up the keyframe cadence to the whole number, so you’ll get the keyframe every 48 or 60 frames like you’d expect.

Not really a big deal in practice I suppose, but I’ve long since internalized the multiples of 48 and 60, which makes it easier to me to figure out where my keyframes are.

Determining bitrates

Picking the optimum single frame size and data rate combination for a particular piece of content can already be a challenge. Having to determine optimal sizes for a bunch of different data rates. Fortunately, Alex Zambelli is as always ready with a handy utility for us – the Smooth Streaming Multi-Bitrate Calculator!

All you need to know is

What bitrate works for the highest frame size for your content
What minimum bitrate you want to go to
How many steps to take

There’s actually some pretty deep math in there that knows how VC-1 bit-per-pixel requirements change as frame size changes, etcetera.

IIS Media Pack 1.0 Released

chriskno — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:19:29 GMT

Following up on our Smooth Streaming announcement last week, today we released IIS Media Pack 1.0! This first release of the IIS Media Pack features two IIS 7.0 extensions that focus on the intelligent delivery of video and audio to end users: Bit Rate Throttling, and Web Playlists.

Bit Rate Throttling

Bit Rate Throttling gives Web server administrators the ability to automatically meter the delivery of 11 built-in media file types, including Windows Media Video (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv), and MPEG-4 (.mp4) files. Additional media formats can be added, as can any non-media file type. By controlling how fast or how much data is downloaded to the client, site operators can see significant bandwidth cost savings for rich media content that has a high drop-off rate, such as videos on popular social media sites. When bandwidth is a concern, reducing the amount of data being sent to end users can increase the number of concurrent users per server.

Another feature of Bit Rate Throttling is dynamic throttling. When enabled, IIS can dynamically split your total available bandwidth allocation across all concurrent users. If you are billed for network usage based on a peak usage billing model, rather than number of datas transferred, this equitably shares extra available bandwidth among all of your users. As new users start to consume the extra bandwidth, dynamic throttling reduces bandwidth to each user, but ensures that the allocated bandwidth for each user will not fall below the specified bit rate for the content being consumed.

Web Playlists

Web Playlists let you deliver server-controlled media playlists from your Web server infrastructure, rather than using a dedicated streaming server. They enable you to control whether clients can Seek or Skip for each media asset, which lends itself very well to monetizing your content with pre-roll and in-stream ads. Web Playlists also obfuscate the location of media assets from the end user, and prevent client-side caching of those assets.

Web Playlists are simple to create and deliver. They are based on a standard playlist format (SMIL), are transformable to other common playlist types, and can be used with many popular media players. If you have existing business applications written in ASP, PHP, etc. to personalize the end user experience, it can be used with Web Playlists on your IIS 7.0 server to provide custom media playlists.

Call to Action

Download and try out the new IIS Media Pack 1.0 release! Add your comments below, or join us in the IIS Media forum, to let us know how well IIS Media Pack 1.0 meets your needs, and how we can make it even better for the next release.

Resources

IIS Media overview

Bit Rate Throttling details

Web Playlists details

IIS Media Pack downloads: 32-bit; 64-bit

I’ve seen the future and the future is… Smooth!

jboch — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:47:04 GMT

Now playing at SmoothHD.com – a preview of video delivery using IIS Smooth Streaming.

Announced this morning in a joint press release by Microsoft and Akamai, IIS Smooth Streaming enables video delivery at the best quality each viewer’s network and hardware will allow. Smooth Streaming builds on the Adaptive Streaming technology developed, tested, and proven by Microsoft in delivering the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the Web. By using standard HTTP requests and responses instead of proprietary streaming protocols requiring proprietary edge servers, IIS is able to offer tremendous cost savings and scalability advantages relative to competing solutions. Finally, IIS simplifies management on the server by minimizing the number of files required.

We’ve put a great deal of work into getting this technology right, so I would encourage you to go to SmoothHD.com, try the experience for yourself, and tell us what you think! So let’s take a look at what IIS Smooth Streaming means…

From a Technical Perspective

Smooth Streaming is a new IIS 7.0 extension that delivers fragments of media content designed for Silverlight-based players, powering the same great Adaptive Streaming user experience seen throughout the NBC Olympics. The upcoming release of Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is used to encode media at a spectrum of bit rates, and publish it directly to the IIS server. The player requests fragments from IIS by using RESTful URLs like…
http://SmoothHD.com/Media.ism/QualityLevels(1024000)/Fragments(video=20000000)
and the IIS server efficiently locates and delivers the corresponding media fragment to the player. Previous iterations of the technology provided a great user experience but proved difficult to manage. IIS greatly simplifies management by reducing the number of files on disk by several orders of magnitude without compromising the quality of playback.

From a Content Delivery Perspective

IIS Smooth Streaming provides industry-leading Total Cost of Ownership by using standard HTTP requests and responses. This allows it to align naturally with existing HTTP delivery and scale-out infrastructures as requests and responses can be proxied and cached by existing edge servers and HTTP appliances. Unlike competing streaming solutions, delivering Smooth Streaming to clients does not require investing in deploying, configuring, and managing a swarm of proprietary distribution servers. IIS Smooth Streaming was created with scalability and HTTP cacheability as first-class design goals, to help our customers minimize the cost per megabyte delivered.

From a Content Producer’s Perspective

Customers will be able to use a new encoding option in Expression Encoder 2 SP1 to author media content ready for Smooth Streaming. Expression Encoder 2 will also include a plug-in that allows customers to publish the media directly to IIS server with a single click, and Akamai has announced plans for a similar plug-in that allows users to publish content directly to the Akamai network. Expression Encoder also allows customer to apply templates that provide both visual styles and Silverlight heuristics algorithms that power the user experience. In short, the products work together to make authoring the content and delivering it to viewers easy and accessible to everyone.

From a Developer’s Perspective

Silverlight and Expression Encoder give developers the power to tune the end-user playback experience for their target audience, and to integrate Smooth Streaming playback into their Silverlight applications. Akamai’s Open Video Player initiative will also made it easy for developers to integrate Smooth Streaming video delivery with value-added services such as advertising and analytics.

Once again, please try the technology for yourself at SmoothHD.com, and also by checking out Expression Encoder 2 SP1 when it becomes available. We’d love to hear what your experience is, and how we can make it better.

--John A. Bocharov

Program Manager, IIS Smooth Streaming

Search results matching tag 'IIS Media Pack'

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Live Smooth Streaming Beta, Inlet's encoder, and the 2010 Winter Olympics

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SmoothHD.com

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Encoding for Multibitrate

Multibitrate Video Options

Multibitrate Audio Options

Multibitrate Container Options

Multibitrate Advanced Codec Settings

Tips for multibitrate encoding

General Codec tweaks

Always On recommendations

Quality over Speed recommendations

Stretch, not Letterbox

Integer Framerates

Determining bitrates

IIS Media Pack 1.0 Released

I’ve seen the future and the future is… Smooth!

From a Technical Perspective

From a Content Delivery Perspective

From a Content Producer’s Perspective

From a Developer’s Perspective

Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 – Intro and Multibitrate Encoding