Search results matching tags 'IIS News Item' and 'IIS Media Pack'

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

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”:

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

Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) Released

vsood — 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.

Web Playlists Go Live release is now ready for downloads

vsood — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:33:00 GMT

I am really excited to announce that Web Playlists Go Live was just released to public. Here are the download links for the same:

Here is a list of walkthroughs published on the all new learn.iis.net:

Here is more about this release: http://www.iis.net/Downloads/files/playlist/WebPlaylists_Readme_GoLive.htm.

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

Web Playlists Go Live release includes these key features:

Support for all digital media files types. Any digital media file type that can be downloaded from a Web server can be added to a Web playlist by using this feature.
Nested Web playlist media entries. Web playlist files (.isx) can be added as media entries to the Web playlists that you create, up to five levels deep. For more information about how nested playlists work in this feature, see Creating a Simple Playlist.
Remote HTTPd media entries. Content locations that begin with the httpd:// URL prefix can be added as media entries to the Web playlists that you create, allowing you to reference a remote Web server page that returns a custom URL or path for the media item to be played.
Session settings. Allows you to specify the maximum number of clients that can connect to the playlist and the amount of content that must be watched before skip functionality is enabled on the client.
Session provider settings. Allows you to add ASP.NET session persistence and provides an additional level of control for the content on a Web server by configuring multiple options that specify how long the content referenced by a playlist is available to users.
Impersonation settings. Allows for media items that are protected by user credentials to be added to playlists.
ASX import. Allows for quick conversion of client-side playlists (files with .asx file name extensions) for files stored on the Web server to Web playlists.
Custom providers. A COM interface is included that you can use to write native and .NET-based custom providers that extend the default behavior of Web Playlists. For more information, see the Extending Web Playlists through custom providers.

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

IIS 7 Media Pack Web Playlists Customer Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) is Live

vsood — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:28:00 GMT

I am really happy to announce that Web Playlists CTP2 is now released.

Web Playlists CTP2 builds on top of CTP1 release that we had in February. It has the following additional features

Extensibility through custom providers – We are releasing interfaces to write custom providers for the Web Playlists. Over the next few days we will be putting out provider samples on blogs. It is amazing what all you can do with this interface. Please read the extensibility walkthrough to get more details on this feature.
Nested Playlists – This allows the ability to nest playlists within a playlist. Please read the Creating a playlist walkthrough for more details.
httpd Entries – This allows adding a reference to a remote app (asp, aspx, or Php) for an entry. The response from the app will determine the actual content path/ URL to be played for that entry. Please read Creating a playlist walkthrough for more details on this.

The download locations for this release are as under and it is complete free :).

Here is a list of walkthroughs available for Web Playlists CTP1 and CTP2 features:

Please let me know your thoughts on this feature. I would be happy to hear any kind of feedback

Bit Rate Throttling is now released

vsood — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Bit Rate Throttling is now out of Beta. We are really pleased to announced the release of IIS Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling

Download Links

The key features that constitute V 1.0 of Bit Rate Throttling are:

Automatically reads the encoded bit rate information from each defined media file type
Per-response bandwidth limiting on progressive downloads for every connection
Throttling rules are configurable at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels
Fast Start experience for end users
Extensible to add support for other media and file formats
Fully integrated into the IIS7 administration and configuration models
Set default and maximum throttling rates, and concurrent connection limits
NEW - Dynamically adjust throttling to account for any available bandwidth as per a configured value (watch out for another post on this shortly)

For more information, see the Bit Rate Throttling walkthroughs:

Bit Rate Throttling Setup Walkthrough. Describes how to download and install the Bit Rate Throttling module.
Bit Rate Throttling Configuration Walkthrough. Describes how to configure the Bit Rate Throttling module at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels, including new Site-level limits.
Bit Rate Throttling Extensibility Walkthrough. Describes how to use the extensibility interface provided by the Rate Throttling module to add support for additional media file types.

I cannot end this post without thanking the team for tremendous hard work. Thank you all!

Andrew, Sam, Jack and Brian for coding it
Jimin and Dave Cox for testing it
David Nelson for all the help content that ships with this release
And of course, I was the PM ;) (It's my post so I get to thank myself)
Chris (PM), for helping out with all earlier releases. We would not have got so far without that.
Mike, for envisioning this idea and doing early prototypes. We would not have this feature without him :)

Bit Rate Throttling is a great value add to the progressive download scenarios. Don't believe me, try it out to believe for yourself. We had fun making it hope you enjoy using the same.