IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit Beta 2 released

Today, we are very both excited and pleased to announce and release a Beta 2 of IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit (SSPDK) 1.0. With this release are adding support for Fast Forward/Rewind and Rough Cut Editing scenarios in addition to other features. Please see details below.

SSPDK is intended to aid the development of rich Smooth Streaming players and experiences. This Kit enables 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 2.

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.
  • 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.

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.

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

  • Basic Playback controls
    • APIs such as Play, Pause, Stop, etc.
    • Events for Playback and Diagnostics
    • Properties to track position, etc.
  • Advanced Playback support
    • DVR support for Live Smooth Streaming
    • Support for keeping track of Live event while in DVR (*new in Beta 2*)
    • Trick Play: Slow Motion
    • Trick Play: Fast Forward / Rewind (*new in Beta 2*)
  • H.264 / AAC support (*new in Beta 2*)
  • Monetization
    • Ad Playback integration – scheduling capabilities, tracking Ad progress
    • Live Ad Insertion with Live Smooth Streaming
    • Rich Analytics with IIS Advanced Logging
    • Support for specifying markers/Ad ingestion point outside the main manifest (*new in Beta 2*)
  • Content Protection – PlayReady integration for VC1 content
  • Composite Manifest Support for scenarios like Rough Cut Editing (*new in Beta 2*)
  • 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
  • SSME is used in Silverlight Media Framework(SMF) and the partnership helps facilitate faster player development

BREAKING CHANGES:

As the Beta evolved we have had to make some changes to some of our APIs. Here is a list of breaking changes:

  • Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming.SmoothStreamingMediaElementState replaces System.Web.Media.MediaElementState as type for CurrentState
  • ManifestDownloaded event is now called ManifestReady.
  • SmoothStreaming.IsClipPlaying property is deprecated. There is a new state SmoothStreamingMediaElementState.ClipPlaying for the same purpose.

Resources

If you are using this kit already to build rich experiences, do let us know. Send me the URL to your player or just add comments below. We are looking forward to customers building really rich experiences.

16 Comments

  • Hi Vishal

    Is the multi-camera selection implemented in the Beta 2? If so, does it work for both live and on-demand, and also for selecting of multiple audio streams?

    Thanks
    Lee

  • Hi Vishal,

    I just tried downloading the SDK Beta 2 following the link in your post, however after clicking download (at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2b1ce605-3b99-49ad-8a26-1250f2acbbf6&displaylang=en).

    It takes me to the thanks for downloading page (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=2b1ce605-3b99-49ad-8a26-1250f2acbbf6&displayLang=en) but at the same time it opens a small pop up window which says "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.".

    I realise you're not the person responsible for this but is there any chance you can look into it?

    I'm doing a presentation on Silverlight and smooth streaming in just over a week and it would be great to include the SSPDK Beta as an option when doing development.

    Cheers,
    Ola Karlsson

  • Hi again Vishal,

    Never mind about that download problem, now it is working :)

    /Ola

  • Do you happen to have a demo of the Beta 2 Player playing a multiple bitrate H264 stream (with AAC audio)?

    When I try it, then whenever a different bitrate is selected, or when I select 'Slow Motion' the video stops playing, successive video chunks get loaded really quickly and the audio freezes as well. Any ideas?

  • Is there documentation anywhere on these new features such as Composite Manifest Support for scenarios like Rough Cut Editing (*new in Beta 2*) and how to use them?

  • Hi,

    This is great news! Do you have any details on the composite manifest feature? Examples or documentation about how to use this.

    Regards,
    Ketil Moland Olsen

  • @arjenw I can't recollect if we have a public demo. Let me get back to you on that

    @KetilMo @sphelan I just blogged about the composite manifest feature here - http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2010/01/22/composite-manifest-support-for-rough-cut-editing-scenarios-in-ssme.aspx

    @leeatkinson Multiple camera worked in Beta 1 and Beta 2 too. No, it is video only.

  • @vsood: thanks for your reply. Just FYI: I've found the culprit. The H264 video stream with the highest bitrate had some incorrect profile/level settings so it wouldn't playback correctly. Disabling the stream did the trick and so far all other H264/AAC videos play fine.

    Out of curiosity: will the next beta support Trickplay for H264? Any other features that we may look forward to?

    Thanks for all the work on the Player!

    Regards,

    Arjen

  • @arjenw I can't really comment on the next version yet as we just finished this one. Is there something you would like to see?

  • @David - Hi, have you looked at SMF (http://smf.codeplex.com)?

  • Hi,

    Please send all support related questions to: http://forums.iis.net/1145.aspx

    Regards
    Vishal

  • @Anonymous, welcome to Smooth streaming. You can find the answers to your questions here - http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/558/smooth-streaming-for-iis-70---getting-started/. You can use the latest player sample instead of the one provided in the article.

  • Are there plans to make the SmoothStreamingMediaElement scriptable so it can be leveraged by javascript via the html DOM?

    Thanks

  • @Joel, the SmoothStreaming.dll was built for SL3 so there are issues people are reporting with SL4 developer runtime. Just the runtime should be fine as SL is backward compatible but if you build a new player with SL4, that might have problems. We will have a newer build out very soon which is built with SL4 and should resolve these issues.

  • Hi vsood, was a newer build of the SmoothStreaming.dll released for public consumption? I dont' see any new activity on this thread. has this project been rolled into another? Thanks @Joel

  • Sorry, all. I just realized there were some unapproved comments. This project is still very much active. It was renamed to IIS Smooth Streaming Client. We have had multiple releases and you can find them here - http://iis.net/smoothplayer.

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