Microsoft PDC 2010 – Streaming Now using IIS Smooth Streaming

PDC10, Live from the Microsoft CampusToday is the start of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) 2010, and you can view it now – live or on-demand – at www.microsoftpdc.com. Powering the streaming at PDC is IIS Smooth Streaming, part of IIS Media Services.

As usual, there will be plenty of big announcements at PDC, including new information about Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure. Two announcements, made by Bob Muglia during the keynote (see the video or the transcript), affect IIS Media Services:

  1. Windows Azure will soon support a VM role so you can run a full Windows Server 2008 R2 image
  2. Full IIS and IIS Smooth Streaming support will soon be enabled natively on Azure!

With this year's event, we have taken the media experience up another level. Not only are we providing live Smooth Streaming of the keynotes, but also concurrent live streaming of all sessions. All of this content will be available for on-demand viewing after the live event ends.

The player experience, built on Silverlight Media Framework 2.0 and hosted on Windows Azure, has some great new functionality. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are a number of cool and useful features built in, including:

  • Swappable large and small video feeds, one for the presenter, and one for the on-screen content (slides and demonstrations – shown here in the upper right)
  • A live Twitter feed, and a Q&A tab for the PDC sessions
  • The ability to copy or Tweet a link to the current session
  • Download Materials available for some sessions
  • Related Content links
  • Live Closed Captions

PDC10 Silverlight player with IIS Smooth Streaming

When you hover your mouse over the player, you also see a two-row overlay set of standard and advanced player controls. From left to right, top to bottom, these include:

  • Clickable Seek bar
  • Current play position and estimated video duration
  • A "Live" button, so if you have paused or replayed some content, you can rejoin the live broadcast
  • A Bookmark button, allowing you to denote key events in the video and then share the URL to point in the video with others
  • Volume control
  • Video quality meter
  • The "Like" button and "Like" counter
  • 15-second instant replay
  • Rewind, Pause, and Fast Forward controls (full live DVR!)
  • Closed Captioning toggle
  • Audio menu – some PDC sessions, such as the keynotes, are available with live audio in five languages
  • Full Screen – which overlays the secondary video over the main window as Picture-in-Picture

PDC10 Silverlight Player Controls

Especially useful for viewing any of the live or on-demand sessions is the Guide tab. This provides a full schedule of PDC sessions, organized by channels, and lets you access more information and video feeds (during or after the event) for each item.

PDC10 Guide - IIS Smooth Streaming Channels

We hope you enjoy participating in PDC through this Silverlight + IIS Smooth Streaming experience!

-Chris

3 Comments

  • Beatiful player and great features!
    Where can I get the source code for this player?
    What capture cards are you using?
    What encoder software are you using?
    How do you get the 5 languages into the live smooth stream?
    What codec are you using?
    What codec settings are you using?
    What frame rate?
    What hardware and software are you using to get the CC working?
    What CDN are you using?
    Why does the video jump every few seconds even though I am on a 35mbps FIOS connection and run this videos on a fresh installed Win7 x64 6 core i7 PC with Nvidia GTX 460 graphic card?

    Thanks!
    Phil

  • Hi Phil. Thanks for the feedback and questions. Here are some answers:

    The player is built on top of the Silverlight Media Framework, available at http://smf.codeplex.com/. I am not aware of any current plans to release the UI source code for this player.
    Capture and encoding was done with Inlet Spinnaker encoders.
    Each of the 5 available languages was encoded as a separate audio track and made available through the live Smooth Streaming manifest.
    VC-1 and WMA were the codecs being used, per the table below...




     Video bit rate (kbps)
     Width 
     Height 
     Frame Rate 
     Notes

    2950
    1280
    720
    29.97
     

    1950
    960
    540
    29.97


    1300
    704
    400
    29.97
    Main Player size

    850
    512
    288
    29.97
     

    550
    400
    224
    29.97
     

    350
    320
    176
    29.97
    PiP size

    Audio:  WMA Pro - 48 kbps - 48 kHz - stereo

    Closed Captioning was created using Evertz HD9084 HD DTV Closed Caption Encoders
    Distribution was by Akamai
    Video "jumps":  We saw many viewers getting consistent HD streams at 2.95 Mbps. Without analyzing your environment, it would be difficult to tell what caused the jumps.
    -Chris

  • @Anonymous - Request granted. You can now download both MP4 and WMV versions of most sessions by going to http://player.microsoftpdc.com/schedule/sessions, clicking on the + sign next to any session, and selecting the file format & size (high or low bit rate) that you want. Hope this helps...

    -Chris

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