Search results matching tag 'Smooth Streaming'

Building your first Smooth Streaming Player using SSME

vsood — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:24:00 GMT

In this post I plan to cover building a very basic Smooth Streaming Player using Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) part of Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit. In other words, building a “Hello World” equivalent for Smooth Streaming Client (“Hello Smooth Streaming”). This post is split into two parts. In the first part, I will be covering how to get basic playback working in a browser window for Smooth Streaming content. This should be really easy as you will see. In the second part, we would add some basic playback controls like Play, Pause, Stop and Volume controls.

Prerequisites

You should either have Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio installed along with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. You can get more information on this here.
Install the Smooth Streaming Developer Kit available here.
This is not a XAML overview session so basic XAML knowledge is required.

Building a Simple Smooth Streaming Player for Playback

The very first thing I wanted to cover here was just basic playback. There are no controls. All you get is a browser window that shows the video playing.

The below outlines steps to achieve this:

Open Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio.
Go to: File –> New Project.
Chose Visual C# as project Type and then select Silverlight. Choose Silverlight Application, name it SimplePlayer.
In your project go to references and add a reference to Microsoft.Web.Media.Smoothstreaming.dll (available as a part of Player development Kit)
Modify MainPage.xaml as under. Set the SmoothStreamingSource property in XAML to the location of the Smooth Streaming content. Replace <<Add your URL here>> with the URL of the content (E.g., it will look something like http://example.com/a.isml/Manifest)

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
    <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<<Add your URL here>>" Grid.Row="0" />
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

This is all you need to get a basic playback working with Smooth Streaming Media Element.

Adding Playback Controls to your Player

Next, once you have the basic playback working, you may want to add some basic controls like Play/Pause button, Stop Button and Volume Control.

Here is what you will see after completing the steps below:

The UI layout

Here are the pieces we need for this in terms of the layout.

Have portion of the screen, which will display the slider control for volume and Play/Pause and Stop buttons
We need a portion for the Video to display
We need to hook these buttons/slider to SSME

For the overall layout, we are using XAML constructs of Stack Panels. here is how we do it in this example:

Code Snippet

<UserControl x:Class="SimplePlayer.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    xmlns:SSME="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="0.95*"></RowDefinition>
            <RowDefinition Height="0.05*"></RowDefinition>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <SSME:SmoothStreamingMediaElement AutoPlay="True" x:Name="SmoothPlayer" SmoothStreamingSource="<<Add your URL here>>" Grid.Row="0" />
        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Row="1">
            <TextBlock x:Name="Volume" VerticalAlignment="Center" Text="Volume" Width="50" />
            <Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />
            <Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>
            <Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />
        </StackPanel>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

We have a Grid with two rows: the first row is SSME and second is a horizontal Stack Panel that has volume slide and Pause / Stop buttons. This is all we need to get the basic layout.

Linking UI to SSME

The next step after getting the UI is to link it back to SSME. We already know how to play the video in SSME. In this section I would cover how to hook up the buttons and the slider.

Silverlight has a concept of template binding that can be used here. In the case of slider, we have a slider volume UI control and a volume property on SSME. All we need to do here is to tell Silverlight via the XAML to bind the slider value to the volume property on SSME. Here is how we do it:

Code Snippet

<Slider x:Name="VolumeBar" Width="60" Value="{Binding Path=Volume, ElementName=SmoothPlayer, Mode=TwoWay}" />

If you see, all we are doing here is saying that bind the Slider Value to the SmoothPlayer’s Volume Path (or property).

For the Play / Pause and Stop buttons, we take a slightly different approach here:

Code Snippet

<Button x:Name="PlayButton" Width="50" Click="PlayButton_Click" Loaded="PlayButton_Loaded"/>
<Button x:Name="StopButton" Content="Stop" Width="50" Click="StopButton_Click" />

Here we want the following to happen:

For the Play/Pause button, we want to do some actions when the button is loaded and then a different action when it is clicked. For this, we hook these actions to PlayButton_Click and PlayButton_Loaded methods in the MainPage.xaml.cs file
For the Stop button we just need to handle the click so we hook up Click with StopButton_Click method.

In the MainPage.xaml.cs file we need to have these methods and do the needful there. Here is what we are doing in this example:

Note: There are other (better) ways of coding this but for simplicity I have tried to keep it very basic for this example

PlayButton_Loaded

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //We need to prepopulate the value of Play/Pause button content, we need to check AutoPlay
    switch (SmoothPlayer.AutoPlay)
    {
        case false:
            PlayButton.Content = "Play";
            break;
        case true:
            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";
            break;
    }
}

PlayButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void PlayButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //Monitor the state of the content to determine the right action to take on this button being clicked
    //and then change the text to reflect the next action
    switch (SmoothPlayer.CurrentState)
    {
        case MediaElementState.Playing:
            SmoothPlayer.Pause();
            PlayButton.Content = "Play";
            break;
        case MediaElementState.Stopped:
        case MediaElementState.Paused:
            SmoothPlayer.Play();
            PlayButton.Content = "Pause";
            break;
    }
}

StopButton_Click

Code Snippet

private void StopButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    //This should simply stop the playback
    SmoothPlayer.Stop();
    //We should also reflect the chang on the play button
    PlayButton.Content = "Play";
}

Summary

In this post, we looked at creating a basic player with common controls for playback of Smooth Streaming Content. Let me know if you have issues or need further help. In subsequent posts I would be diving into adding more features into this player.

The project sample for this example is availble here(SimplePlayer.zip).

Note: These are just samples meant for educational purposes and there is no guarantee conferred on the quality of code

Webinar: How to Deliver True HD with Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming

chriskno — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:56:00 GMT

On Thursday, October 15th, we will be presenting a webinar entitled "How to Deliver True HD with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming." During the one-hour webinar, we'll cover the following topics...

What Smooth Streaming is and why it is the future of online video delivery
How Smooth Streaming delivers HDTV-quality experiences over HTTP
How it has been successfully implemented for major live events and on-demand content
The end-to-end steps for delivering your content with Smooth Streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming is part of the recently-released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. Part of that release was the beta of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight.

I will be co-presenting with Jaime Miles from Level 3, with whom we worked on Smooth Streaming of many high-visibilty live events over the last five months. You can learn more about some of those events on our IIS Smooth Streaming Showcase.

To learn more and register for this free event, please visit the event information page on StreamingMedia.com. For those that cannon attend the live event, an on-demand version will be available from that page starting on Friday.

-Chris

IIS Media Services 3.0 and Player SDK released!

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:47:44 GMT

Last week was a big one for Smooth Streaming! IIS Media Services 3.0, the IIS7 media extensions pack containing Smooth Streaming, has completed its 6-month beta development cycle and has been released to Web. You can download it here:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/LiveSmoothStreaming

Chris Knowlton has written an excellent summary of everything that’s gone into this release. Here’s just a brief list of components:

Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients
Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

IIS Media Services 3.0, including IIS Live Smooth Streaming, has been released

chriskno — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:31:00 GMT

What Just Happened?

We just released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. This includes the new IIS Live Smooth Streaming and the separate IIS Advanced Logging package.

In addition, we released the beta of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight. Supported features include PlayReady, DVR controls, instant replay, slow motion, multiple camera angles, alternate audio tracks, content protection, ad integration, in-stream data feeds, and more.

Market Impact

Since April, 2009, key broadcasters around the world have used beta versions of IIS Media Services 3.0 to successfully broadcast some of the world's premier live events. These include the Tour de France and the Roland Garros 2009 International French Open Tennis Tournament on France Télévisions; the IAAF Athletics World Championships and FINA Swimming World Championships on both France Télévisions and RAI; the FIFA Confederations Cup South Africa 2009 on RAI; and Champions League Soccer on BSkyB; as well as events such as the Michael Jackson Memorial on Sympatico/MSN inMusic and SKY News. In a combined effort with Microsoft, NBC Sports and others, Wimbledon Live delivered more than 6,500 minutes of live and on-demand Smooth Streaming video via a high-definition (HD), interactive online video experience. Each Sunday this Fall, NBC and Microsoft are broadcasting Sunday Night Football on-line in HD, utilizing live DVR controls, multiple camera angles, slow motion, ad integration, analytics, and other cutting-edge features. 26 such trial deployments are currently highlighted on the Smooth Streaming Showcase.

Component Overview

With this release, the key elements of the IIS media server platform now include:

Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients
Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Download the latest IIS Media offerings

You can download all of the IIS media server platform components using the Web Platform Installer button on the IIS Media page (http://www.iis.net/media).

Key new features:

See these blog posts to learn more about the key new features that are part of this release:

IIS Live Smooth Streaming: http://blogs.iis.net/jboch/archive/2009/10/09/rtw-of-live-smooth-streaming-is-now-live.aspx
IIS Advanced Logging: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/12/iis-advanced-logging-1-0-released.aspx
IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit – Beta 1: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/09/iis-smooth-streaming-player-development-kit-1-0-beta-1-released.aspx

Give the IIS Media server platform a try, and let us know what you think on our Forum.

-Chris

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 Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 Released

vsood — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:08:00 GMT

Today, we released IIS Media Services 3.0 that supports both On Demand, Live Smooth Streaming and IIS Advanced Logging. Please refer to the announcement of this release in Chris Knowlton’s blog post for details. As a part of this release, we are very both excited and pleased to announce and release a Beta of IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0. This is intended to aid the development of rich Smooth Streaming players and experiences. This Kit allows you to build players for both On Demand and Live playback with full DVR capabilities, Live Ad Insertion, Multiple Camera Angles and many more such rich functionalities. This Kit is available for download here – Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1.

The kit includes:

Smooth Streaming Player SDK – This enables developers and designers to build rich Smooth Streaming player experiences. We are providing a .net (Silverlight) based SDK with full XAML support. The core part of this infrastructure is Smooth Streaming Media Element that is similar to Silverlight Media Element if you are already familiar with Silverlight development platform. There is initial documentation of the APIs are available on MSDN.
Push Encoder – This tool allows you to simulate a live stream for testing purposes.
Sample Smooth Streaming Player (built on Smooth Streaming Player SDK) – This is a sample that uses Smooth Streaming Player SDK and enables you to test the IIS Media Services 3.0.

More instructions on using the Sample player and Push Encoder to test Live Smooth Streaming in your environment are available in the walkthrough here.

As I mentioned earlier, the Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) APIs provide an easy interface for developers and designers to create rich Smooth Streaming experiences using the Silverlight platform. These APIs provide support for simple operations like Play, Pause and Stop and also more complex ones like scheduling Ads, selecting and tracking bit-rates for Smooth Streaming playback and many more. Please stay tuned on this blog for samples on how to use these APIs to build experiences. I will start with basic playback and progress on to building richer player applications.

In the meantime here is a high level overview of features that SSME supports today:

Basic Playback controls
- APIs like Play, Pause, Stop, etc.
- Events for Playback and Diagnostics
- Properties to track position, etc.
Advanced Playback support
- DVR support for Live Smooth Streaming
- Trick Play: Slow Motion
Monetization
- Ad Playback integration – scheduling capabilities, tracking Ad progress
- Live Ad Insertion w/ Live Smooth Streaming
- Rich Analytics w/ IIS Advanced Logging
Content Protection – PlayReady integration
XAML support for designers
Selecting Tracks for playback (e.g., restrict the bit-rates available, support multiple camera angles in a single stream, etc.)
Support for progressive download Ads/content
Almost all of the Silverlight Media Element APIs are available for Smooth Streaming w/ SSME

Resources

Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1
API documentation for Smooth Streaming Player SDK
More Information on Smooth Streaming
More Information on Live Smooth Streaming

Hope you have fun using this SDK, the same way we did developing it.

Happy Smooth Streaming.

NBC Sunday Night Football - Powered by Silverlight and Smooth Streaming

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:39:20 GMT

Has it really been 5 months since my last post? Well, one of the reasons why I’ve been so inactive here is because I’ve been busy working on this project:

Today we are launching the NBC Sunday Night Football website: http://snfextra.nbcsports.com featuring a truly cutting-edge video player powered by Microsoft Silverlight and IIS7 Smooth Streaming.

The first game, Titans vs Steelers, is to be broadcast today (September 10th) at 5 pm PST. The next game, Bears vs Packers, is scheduled for this Sunday (September 13th) at 5 pm PST. Due to NBC broadcast rights for SNF, the website is restricted to U.S.-based users only (sorry, expats!).

The project is the culmination of over 5 months of hard work involving NBC, Microsoft (technical project management and core technologies), iStreamPlanet (video encoding services and realtime data integration), Vertigo (player design and development), Akamai (content delivery), Inlet (video encoding technology), Conviva (realtime content delivery analytics), Omniture (web analytics) and DoubleClick (advertising).

The SNF player will feature:

Live Smooth Streaming video, for all of the content, all of the time
Seamless on-demand switching between the 720p HD main broadcast feed and four 480p SD alternate camera angles
Full motion thumbnail previews of all alternate camera angles
Seeking, pausing, fast forwarding and rewinding of live video
Slow motion and instant replay
Realtime game stats data
Realtime timeline markers and chapter menu providing instant access to all key game plays

There are a ton of other features I’m probably forgetting right now, but I will make sure to follow up soon with another blog post covering all those as well as the technical video details of the project (bitrates, resolutions, codecs, etc).

Smooth Streaming specifications now posted on-line

chriskno — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Smooth Streaming and Live Smooth Streaming, both part of IIS Media Services 3.0, have been generating a lot of interest from content owners who want to provide a seamless viewing experience up to 1080p for their end users. Even in the Beta stage of Live Smooth Streaming, there have been dozens of live trials at high-visibility events, such as the French Open and the FIFA Confederations Cup.

Today, we issued a press release highlighting this momentum and giving a preview of what we'll be demonstrating at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam later this week. To enable third parties who wish to build on IIS Smooth Streaming and the broader Microsoft media platform, we also released two specifications under the Community Promise Initiative:

The IIS Smooth Streaming Transport Protocol Specification describes how live and on-demand Smooth Streaming audio/video content is distributed and cached over an HTTP network.
The Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) specification defines a standard multimedia file format for delivery and playback of protected multimedia content, and is highly compatible with IIS Smooth Streaming Transport.

To learn more, see the press release: Microsoft Raises the Bar for Delivery of Live HD Online Video Using HTTP.

-Chris

TIm Harader and John Bishop in Live HD web event Thur the 16th

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:02:00 GMT

So, Millimeter is hosting a live web event about Live Smooth Streaming, featuring the always-awesome John Bishop of Inlet and our own (also excellent) Tim Harader.

With those two together, expect an hour of real-world experience and context with awesome technical details and delivered with a charming Carolina lilt.

It's Thursday, July 16th, at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -5)

You can register here:
https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=153230&sessionid=1&key=00ED2EDFCB275415AFB7059389F8B18B&partnerref=mminlethdv4&sourcepage=register

Full description:

Learn how to deliver web video with the quality and reliability of HDTV. Dramatically increase viewing times and repeat visits using this scalable online video delivery technology.

Standard video on the Web is plagued by 2 major issues: the quality of the video (either too small or too blurry) and the reliability of the playback (constant rebuffering or stuttering). These two variables are interrelated: increasing the quality requires higher bandwidth, and using less bandwidth to minimize rebuffering sacrifices video quality.

Smooth Streaming solves these issues by dynamically modifying the bandwidth of the video stream based on available bandwidth and individual PC performance. This process is invisible to viewers; they just connect to the live event. If bandwidth drops, the video seamlessly transitions to the next lower stream. When the bandwidth recovers, the stream will automatically use the higher bandwidth. This enables the viewer to watch the live event in the best possible quality at all times, without pauses or interruptions in the video stream.

During this webcast, you will learn about Smooth Streaming from two industry experts, who will teach you:

What Smooth Streaming is and why it is the future of online video delivery

How Smooth Streaming delivers HDTV-quality experiences

How it has been successfully implemented for major live events

How to start delivering your content with Smooth Streaming

My Silverlight 3 preview up at StreamingMedia.com

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:11:00 GMT

The newest in my "Silverlight Guru" interviews with Troy Dreier is up now. It offers a concise overview of some of the big features we have coming for Silverlight 3 and with our encoding infrastructure.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268

And the previous installments are here:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11188
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11140

We're doing these roughly once a month, mainly driven by questions from the Streaming Media forums or send directly to Troy.

As Troy alwasy ends the interviews:

Submit your Silverlight questions to Streaming Media’s Formats, Codecs, and Players forum, or send them directly to the author at