Search results matching tag 'Microsoft'

Streaming Media West

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:38:41 GMT

This week, I'm at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California. Seeing the sun, blue skies and relatively warm weather is a pleasant change from the rain swept northwest.
Today is a special pre-conference half-day workshop on Live Broadcasting with Silverlight and Windows Media, which my colleague Chris Knowlton is running. We're videotaping it for posterity and will get it posted as soon as we can.
On Wednesday morning, Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live will be delivering the keynote at 9am and on Wednesday afternoon, Steven Woodward from Microsoft and Mike Moser from Vertigo will be delivering a special session on real-world Smooth Streaming using a very recent and timely event as an example.
The exhibition runs Tuesday evening through Thursday afternoon and we'll have a special 20 minute presentation of Smooth Streaming on the show floor on Thursday at 1pm.
If you want to attend the conference or exhibition and don't yet have a pass, you can register at a discounted rate by going to https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=smw2009 and using the VIPMSFT as the promo code.

Innovative France 24 Silverlight Player

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:03:00 GMT

France 24, the French 24 hour news channel, has introduced a new Silverlight-based player that also uses Smooth Streaming to deliver an innovative take on live news. You can check out the player and their blog post (in French.)

Here’s the quick summary of the France 24 French blog post:

“Imagine that each spoken word in a video is automatically transcribed and associated with a recorded video sequence. Add to that a program grid, real-time viewer data and vote tallying. Then present all of this in a high definition player that enables you to control the playback and you get the latest prototype presented by France 24 and built in collaboration with the R&D teams at Yacast Media and Microsoft.”

What does this actually let you do? Well a number of really neat things:

Live SD broadcast content at up to 1.3Mbps using Smooth Streaming, so you get the best quality video to suit your bandwidth and CPU (Smooth Streaming isn’t just for HD).
The player timeline is the program grid. Instead of blindly guessing a particular program might start, you actually see the program listings under the timeline. Clicking on the back or forward arrows move the timeline by an hour.
Tags (metadata) of keywords are automatically extracted from the program audio. The tags are shown as a pop-up over the timeline and provide another navigation option.
A real-time graph showing the volume of viewers of the stream.
A real-time bubble chart showing voting – the votes represent users who recommend a particular portion of the program.

Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:58:41 GMT

We’ve been nominated in three categories for the 2009 Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards. There are 22 categories in all and run the gamut from content to technologies. You can enter your votes here. We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

Voting closes on October 16th and the winners will be announced at Streaming Media West in San Jose on November 18th, so if you feel inclined to vote please do so soon.

Obviously, I’m not asking you to vote specifically for us, but if you don’t know about the awards then you can’t vote so I thought I’d at least let everyone know and hope for the best :)

Roll Up! Roll Up! Get Your Smooth Streaming Here!

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:48:57 GMT

Want to know more about Smooth Streaming in the real world? Join us on Thursday October 15th at 11am Pacific time for a special live web broadcast hosted by Streaming Media Magazine.

Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media Magazine will moderate the discussion between our very own Chris Knowlton who is a senior program manager in the IIS team at Microsoft, and Jaime Miles who is the head of European Architecture and Engineering for Level 3 Communications in Europe.

The webcast will cover how to deliver HD quality web video over HTTP. Chris will talk about the technology and benefits of Smooth Streaming, and Jaime will give real-world examples of how Level 3 have implemented the technology for recent high-profile live events such as Roland Garros and the UEFA Super Cup.

Head over to StreamingMedia.com to sign-up!

70th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:02:29 GMT

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, Netflix is doing two very special events:

A live “Songs from Oz” concert in Central Park featuring songs from the movie. The concert is being streamed on-demand using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.
A special free presentation of the remastered movie itself on Sunday October 3rd for Netflix subscribers and non-subscribers alike, also streamed using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.

The events have been made possible through the combination of Netflix, Microsoft, iStreamPlanet and Limelight.

You can find out more about the event by visiting the Netflix Wizard of Oz site.

Canal+ Launches FOOT+ Soccer Channel in Silverlight

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:37:47 GMT

Groupe CANAL, the premiere pay television channel in France with 10.6 million subscribers, is adopting Microsoft Silverlight for their FOOT+ online streaming video service. devoted to covering French and European soccer. FOOT+, which is an additional subscription service to Canal+ customers, provides live and on-demand access to French and European soccer including the French Ligue 1, UEFA Champions League and the Europa League. More information can be found here and in the French press release (PDF).

Community TechDays in Hyderabad: September 20th 2009

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:50:00 GMT

Hey Everybody,

Community TechDays India is back and with loads of action. And why is that? Because, it is in 11 Cities with 19 insightful Technical Sessions. I would be participating in the event that is being held in Hyderabad, A.P, India. I will be taking a session on IIS 7.5 Administration with Windows Server 2008 R2. It's going to be a level 100-200 session where in I would like to bring people up to date with the latest developments in IIS 7.5 that ships with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. I would also be speaking on PHP enhancements and the web platform installer.

Community TechDays is a free event and all you need to do is, register to the event. You can also view the event live from your desktop just by joining into the session. Here's how you could register for the online event.

The agenda for the event in Hyderabad can be found here. The Venue is Microsoft IDC, Beside ISB at Gachibowli, Hyderabad.

My Speaker Profile is here. :D ;)

I should be having more to write post event. Hope to see a lot of you at the event... Have Fun...

Windows Cache Extension for PHP is here

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Microsoft has released a Beta of a new PHP accelerator named Windows Cache Extension for PHP. It's a pretty cool thing for anybody who deals with a lot of PHP applications on Windows because the way I see it and Microsoft explains is the same. We can now have even better performance from PHP applications! How?

Basically, as the name suggests Windows Cache Extension is a caching technique which results in better performance results, as not every request asking for the same resource needs to go to the source in order to fetch it.

Before we get into the details... here's how you get it ... But even before that lets go over some requirements:

The extension is supported only on the following configurations:

Windows OS:

Windows XP SP3 with IIS 5.1 and FastCGI Extension
Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and FastCGI Extension
Windows Vista SP1 with IIS 7.0 and FastCGI Module
Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 and FastCGI Module
Windows 7 with IIS 7 and FastCGI Module
Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS 7.0 and FastCGI Module

PHP:

PHP 5.2.X, Non-thread-safe build
PHP 5.3 X86, Non-thread-safe VC9 build

IMPORTANT: The Windows Cache Extension can only be used when IIS is configured to run PHP via FastCGI.

To download the correct extension choose from the below:

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP 5.2 - Beta

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP 5.3 – Beta

Installation of the the extension is not different from the installation of any other PHP extension.

Get hold of the dll
Put it in the \ext directory of php
Modify the php.ini ... (in this case extension = php_wincache.dll )
Refresh the app pools using php and DONE!

Once that is done you should be seeing something like the below:

Windows cache extension for PHP has 3 caching techniques namely:

PHP Opcode Cache
File Cache
Relative File Path Cache

It would take time and a repetitive action to explain then here... So you can get more information and explanation on these can be found here and here.

Have Fun!

Tech-Ed Japan Smooth Streamed

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:06:06 GMT

Tech-Ed Japan 2009 has embraced Smooth Streaming. You can watch the keynote (in Japanese) for a few more days here. Enjoy!

ASP.NET Mini-URL on CodePlex

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:52:39 GMT

Here is a sample ASP.NET MVC application to show how to create URL shrink/snippet/etc and handling of shorten URLs.

The purpose of this sample project is to show developers how simple it is to create a simple URL redirection service like tinyurl, is.gd or snurl. To get a full listing of all available URL redirection services, check out the open directory listing.

I thought it was interesting and thought you might too.

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