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:

http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2010/01/22/composite-manifest-support-for-rough-cut-editing-scenarios-in-ssme.aspx

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