IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 Released

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

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

Happy Smooth Streaming.

6 Comments

  • Peter, the problem you are seeing might be addressed by this thread - http://forums.iis.net/p/1161702/1920761.aspx. Please feel free to add more on the thread if it is still not resolved.

    Source Implementation: At this point we are planning on making this availble in binary form only.

    Documentation: We are working on samples and more documentation. I would be blogging samples that cover features areas.

  • The primary reason for obfuscation is to avoid fragmentation of the client platform. We have noticed in the past that some players have decompiled the un-obfuscated binary & made modifications which led to incompatibility of the content & created unnecessary support issues. This helps us prevent fragmentation of the ecosystem and allows us to keep up the rapid pace of innovation.

  • Thanks for sharing your logging questions. I am following up on the logging discussion in the forum here - http://forums.iis.net/p/1162055/1922037.aspx

  • Hi Vishal,

    Can you point me to some resource on live ad insertion or for that matter how to provide text streams dynamically.
    The scenario is I have a pre-encoded smooth streaming content and need to append metadata dynamically. e.g. Announcements etc., without having to encode the content again.

    Thanks in advance.
    - Sushil

  • I cant download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 Released or Beta 2

    Keeps going to a page not found. Any ideas?

  • Link to "Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1" are all broken. Where do i download the pushencoder.exe?

    Thanks,

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