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Beta 2 of the IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit (SSPDK) contains a very important Silverlight control called the SmoothStreamingMediaElement. This control is the core client side component for making Smooth Streaming work in Silverlight.
In the latest release, Vishal Sood and team have added in support for a new manifest format called the Composite Manifest.
This new manifest can be used in scenarios where you want to do one of the following:
- Create a new video clip that is composed of many smaller sections of existing content.
- Create a single or series of highlight clips from a very long clip (which could be the archive of a live event).
I view this new Composite Manifest like a new Edit Decision List (EDL) format since I have a background in the broadcast and post production world. This new manifest allows me to create a cuts only EDL file that can be used by the player to dynamically generate new clips without going through the process of re-assembling, re-encoding, or trans-muxing assets.
This new manifest enables really cool scenarios where you can create Edit Decision Lists (EDLs) on the fly in a web based RCE tool (more coming on this later…) and generate new assets from existing ones without touching the content.
Pay close attention to the fact that even though your Smooth Streaming files may have chunks that are 2 seconds in duration, the new Composite Manifest lets you start and end your clips within the boundaries of that chunk. So you are not restricted to making edits at the fragmented-MP4 chunk boundaries.
Read up on the new Composite Manifest format and how to define Clips here:
Vishal Sood posted a new blog entry on the latest release of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit Beta 2 last week.
Read all about the new features in the Player SDK, and download the bits here: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2010/01/15/iis-smooth-streaming-player-development-kit-beta-2-released.aspx
Key features include:
-
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
The Silverlight Media Framework has also been updated to version 1.1 which includes the latest SmoothStreamingMediaElement from Beta 2 of the Smooth Streaming Player SDK. This includes support for progressive download content in addition to Smooth Streaming format support.
Get the latest drop of the Silverlight Media Framework 1.1 on Codeplex: http://smf.codeplex.com/
Michael Scherotter just posted a great sample of creating Netflix style ‘zoetrope’ player thumbnails in Silverlight.
His sample uses the latest version of the Silverlight Media Framework that is posted at http://smf.codeplex.com, and Expression Encoder 3.0.
We are looking into adding in support for embedded "Zoetrope” tracks to the Smooth Streaming Format SDK and Silverlight Media Framework in a later release.
Demo: http://xmldocs.net/smf
Source Code: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SMFThumbnailScrub
