Archives
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Moving my blog to Channel 9
Hello all,
Sorry so long without blogging. I've been in the process of getting moved over from On10.net to Channel 9 for reasons to tiresome to mention, and this little side project has been eating up a lot of my time.
So, going forward, my official new home is
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benwaggoner/
And soon good old
http://www.benwaggoner.com/
Will direct there as well.
So going forward, that is where you'll find all the Ben Waggoner Silverlight/Smooth Streaming/compression/media technology goodness.
At some point I'm hoping to get my old On10.net posts migrated over, but for the meantime they will also remain here at the old blog.
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Tesco and Silverlight delivering the full disc experience without a disc
I'm here in Amsterdam with furious jetlag, but happy to finally be able to discuss one of big things I've been working on for a while. We've been working on using Silverlight to deliver full interactive movie experiences ala Blu-ray and DVD, liberated from the shiny disc. I've been frustrated for years that, despite the PC being a much deeper interactive platform than disc players, digital downloads so far have included much less interactivity than even basic DVDs. They've just been a rectangle of video and a single track of audio: no alternate language audio or subtitles, no menus, no extras, no director's commentary. With Silverlight, we're pushing hard to change that. We've now announced our first major customer: UK retail giant Tesco. Here's the press release, and the money quote:
Tesco, one of the world’s leading retailers, and Microsoft Corp., worldwide leader in software, today announced a collaboration to launch the next generation of home video viewing. The new service, built on Microsoft Silverlight technology, will deliver a similar level of quality as consumers have come to expect from DVD and Blu-ray, but with advanced Web-based interactivity and a viewing experience that goes beyond other digital playback products in the marketplace.
Starting in the autumn, Tesco will allow customers in the U.K. who purchase certain home video titles from Tesco to download “digital copy” versions of movies to their Windows-based or Apple Macintosh computers in a “virtual DVD” experience. The digital copy versions will include a similar level of video quality, interactivity and bonus content available on the physical products. In addition, the digital copy versions will provide consumers with extra network-connected features such as auto-updated trailers, exclusive bonus content, movie viewing parties with online chat, related music offerings such as MP3s and ring tones, and networked games.
Yep, the goal is to provide everything that DVD and Blu-ray can do, and beyond. And it'll be launched by Tesco this fall. There's more details and a screenshot on the Silverlight Team Blog. This is going to be a very big deal, and I'll be talking about it plenty going forward.
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Ben at IBC; come on by
For those mourning my relative blog interactivity and going to IBC, you can get your fill of the live Ben Waggoner 3D experience at the Microsoft both. I'll be at the booth at least several hours every day. I'll get final details up here before the show opens.
Microsoft is in the lovely-but-elusive Topaz Lounge again this year. Compared to the screetching din of a show like NAB, it's quite civilized, down to coffee in china cups.
The Topaz Lounge is situated on the First Floor of the RAI, nearby the Elicium and can be accessed from the Auditorium and the escalators from exhibition halls 2 and 3.
IBC will be putting together an interactive map and upload onto the IBC website. -
Project Tuva: highly cool Silverlight player of Richard Feynman lectures
Sorry it's been so long without any blogging. Between my class at Stanford, finishing the second edition of my compression book, and a profoundly cool project that'll hopefully be announced soon, things have been beyond busy.
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TIm Harader and John Bishop in Live HD web event Thur the 16th
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: -
Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 announcement roundup
So, Silverlight 3 was released today, and the Expression Studio is available in a public release candidate, including the awesome Expression Encoder 2.
I'll have a bunch more to say about it, of course, but first off let me just provide links to the important stuff relating to the media side of things.
Scott Guthrie's always-excellent blog post roundup:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-released.aspx
Technical overview of media features:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/media/media-details.aspx#smooth
Expression Encoder 3 overview:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder_Overview.aspx
Extensive blog post about Expression Encoder 3 new features (it is awesome):
http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/archive/2009/07/10/9828866.aspx
Alas, the RC of that isn't available for download quite yet. Soon, I'm told.
And I had this interview on Streaming Media about the new media features:
http://streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268 -
My Silverlight 3 preview up at StreamingMedia.com
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 -
My Michael Jackson Player
The default player is only embedding at 848x wide. So I'll see if I've go the HTML-fu to embed big enough to get the full 1280x720.
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Michael Jackson Memorial in live HD Smooth Streaming July 7th 10am PDT
Just got some news: tomorrow's Michael Jackson memorial is going to be broadcast live in 720p Smooth Streaming by Sympatico / MSN inMusic. The feed is originating from Canada, but is not georestricted! I think this is the first globally available Live HD Smooth Streaming event.
The event kicks off at 10am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -8). It will hopefully be up as on-demand for 24 hours after, but we're still confirming the rights for that.
Check back tomorrow AM for any updates.
P.S. The Tour de France is also doing Live HD Smooth Streaming, following the success of the French Open. It's georestricted to France, alas. -
Wimbledon Championships in live 720p
One of the things distracting me from blogging lately has now been announced: the Wimbledon Championships are going to be live HD in Silverlight starting today (Saturday June 27th). Full details (once again) at the Silverlight Team Blog. This is going to be the biggest English language Live Smooth Streaming event so far, coming off the successful French International tennis tournament at Roland Garros. It’s amazing to think that this came together in just eight weeks, and amazing the amount of work that has gone into it. From the blog:
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Silverlight on Xbox 360 demo at Cannes
Some of you have asked me about Scott Guthrie's twitter mention of the Xbox 360 Silverlight advertising demo at Cannes. So, yes, Silverlight 3 is coming to the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. We're mainly discussing this in the context of advertising at this point.
We've got some more info up about it at the (reliably interesting and informative) Silverlight Team Blog.
There's plenty to read there, but here's the overview: -
Tim Harader and friends on May 28th Live Streaming online workshop
Streaming Media has been doing a series of online workshops on various topics. They themselves are live streaming, with a chat backchannel which. It’s great to showcase the technology in itself like this. I myself have been guilty of “typing about moving images” plenty of times; a sin up there with “dancing about architecture.”
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Project Starlight: Multicast Plug-in for Silverlight
It’s Streaming Media East this week. Alas, I’m racing towards a book deadline, and so am skipping the show for the first time in years. I miss it; it’s long been one my favorite shows of the year, and an extremely productive place to meet with customers, partners, as well as a family reunion for us grizzled veterans of digital media.
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First Moonlight 2.0 Preview Out - with Smooth Streaming
Novell has just released the first Moonlight 2.0 Preview, dubbed Moonlight 1.9. It adds a bunch of new Silverlight 2 features, and offers compatibility with many more sites. Near and dear to my heart, it supports Smooth Streaming. Deep Zoom is also working.
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First Moonlight 2.0 Preview Out – with Smooth Streaming
Novell has just released the first Moonlight 2.0 Preview, dubbed Moonlight 1.9. It adds a bunch of new Silverlight 2 features, and offers compatibility with many more sites. Near and dear to my heart, it supports Smooth Streaming. Deep Zoom is also working.
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IDMA/DVDA Excellence Awards - submissions due by May 15th
Oh, I’ve been so remiss in blogging this. Fortunately the submission date just got extended (not a great idea to a media technology due date so close to NAB…).
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First Smooth Streaming User-Generated Content
So, this is irrationally exciting for me; what's perhaps the first UGC (user-generated content) in Smooth Streaming. Two of our awesome evangelists, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toldeo were in New Zealand for WEB09. They were invited to do a code-off with three Adobe representatives to build a cool app to raffle off the event prizes. Needless to say, they scored an overwhelming victory, even outnumbered 3:2. One would expect no less; no real news there.
What I'm jazzed about is that our local NZ web whiz Nigel Parker went and posted a Smooth Streaming video of the darn thing! And none of us Redmond-based video nerd knew about it until it had been live for a couple of days! We on the video side had been talking about how to jumpstart Smooth Streaming UGC, and here these guys go ahead and just do it.
So, in a foreshadowing of how it'll feel when my kids head off to college, all our work on Silverlight, Expression Encoder, and IIS Smooth Streaming has apparently paid off, and even developer/designer evangelists can now author, encode, and post nicely done Smooth Streaming video, and on a lark.
I must admit this disturbing trend for me personaly, as they're now far better compressionists than I am a developer or designer. I could assuage myself by noting they should have used Denoise, and the player's embeded size isn't calibrated to provide Fast Path playback at the highest resolution. But that's weak tea at best. They did well, without a word of advice from Alex or myself.
I clearly need to go back to our codec PhDs and ask them to add strange options with even more esoteric names; Adaptive Deadzone and DQuant apparently weren't a high enough barrier to entry. Perhaps "Chroma subsampling phase decorrelator?" Too Trek. "motion-vector back-propogation feedback via lookahead for per macroblock differental quantization rate distortion optimization" Hmmm, that actually might work. "Pixel-throoper?" I need the flanger for compression...
Joking aside, a big goal of Silverlight is to expand the reach of our community of developers and designers, and making stuff they can casually use like this is exactly what we are trying to do.
I can't wait to see what they'll do with Silverlight 3 and Expression Encoder 3. We're just getting started. -
Cool Smooth Streaming demo site from CDNetworks
Our friends at CDNetworks announced their adoption of Smooth Streaming last week. And now they’ve have made a very cool new Smooth Streaming demo site: http://www.nextcdn.com/Silverlight.htm.
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NAB Day 1: Smooth Streaming released, Partners, 1080p in SL3, new VC-1
Which is a huge swath of the professional compression tools market.
DRM service provider support
And we've had a bunch of support for Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady from DRM service providers. Since Silverlight encryption is applied during content creation, not during content distribution, using DRM has no real impact on the server side; access to a DRM license server to provide licenses to the Silverlight client is the only big difference from a service perspective. -
Compressionist Party Details - Encore Tower Suite 1805
Okay, as promised here's the actual location of the Compressionist Party tomorrow, Tuesday, April 21.
It's at the Encore at Wynn (aka "Wynn Encore" and "Encore Las Vegas") Tower Suite 1805.
As promised 6-9 pm. There should be some beverages and light snacks.
RSVP isn't required, but it'd be great if you could email me if you think you're coming so I can make sure we're set up adequately.
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NAB 2009 Ben Waggoner Compression Party and booth schedule
I was out sick last week, and I’m not emotionally prepared to admit that NAB is next week.
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Proposed definition of HD on the web, with examples
The essential Dan Rayburn had a good blog post asking we, Adobe, and the industry overall agree on a definition for HD Video on the web.
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March Madness: Silverlight on YouTube and encoding settings
As mentioned previously, the NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament is going on at the moment, being covered by CBS Sports using Silverlight. For readers not from North America, it’s hard to explain how crazy people are for this event. In an extra bonus , a bunch of games are being held here in Portland, Oregon in the first couple rounds. And of course, we’re doing it in Silverlight. The official player is at http://mmod.ncaa.com/video/. Make sure to hit the “HQ” button for the full Silverlight experience.
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Live Smooth Streaming Beta, Inlet's encoder, and the 2010 Winter Olympics
Lots is going on at MIX, so as not to overwhelm with too many posts, I’ll try to triple-dip on this one.
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Silverlight 3 Beta - What's New for Media
So, Silverlight 3 was released for public beta today, during Scott Guthrie’s keynote at MIX. There will be an on-demand version of it later on at Visitmix.com. There’s tons of info flowing around today, so I’m just going to focus on the media-related news that came out today. I’ll be posting a lot this week; check back for more details as they’re revealed. And feel free to ask questions in the comments area below.
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Akamai's Smooth Streaming officially launched, with customers!
It’s MIX09 this week, so brace yourselves for a deluge of media-related blogging from me.
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Beta Release of Smooth Streaming!
It’s alive!
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Encoding Big Buck Bunny for SmoothHD.com
So far, Alex Zambelli has had most of the SmoothHD.com fun while I was off on some other projects, but this time he was off on some other projects and I got to do an encode all myself.
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Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 – Intro and Multibitrate Encoding
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.