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.

Article: http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2010/01/22/scrubbing-with-thumbnails-with-the-smf-player.aspx

Demo: http://xmldocs.net/smf

Source Code: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SMFThumbnailScrub

James Clarke provides a great overview of the new features in this blog post.

To check out the Screen Capture tool in action, check out Keith Comb’s HD Screencast demo post here.

Today I wanted to check out the new API, particularly the new sample PowerShell 2.0 module that James built out to put into the SDK.

You can locate the new sample PowerShell cmdlet in the Samples directory of the SDK :  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 3\SDK\Samples\EncoderPowerShellModule.

The sample comes as a Visual Studio C# project that you need to compile. I converted the project to a VS 2010 solution and then compiled it quickly without any issues.

Note that there is a post-build script that is run to copy the output into your WindowsPowershell modules folder – watch out for that if you have Powershell configured in a non-default way.

I created a folder called ExpressionEncoder in my Modules folder under WindowsPowershell and deployed the ExpressionEncoder.dll into that folder.

The big trick if you are running on Windows 7 RC x64, you have to launch the PowerShell (x86) version and not the x64 version or you will get an error message that the Microsoft.Expression.Encoder assembly can’t be found.  That is due to the fact that it is a 32 bit assembly and it can’t be loaded from the x64 version of PowerShell 2.0.

Once you switch over to the x86 version of PowerShell 2.0, you can edit your $profile, and add the following line to it.

import-module ExpressionEncoder

Now you can do something like the following to batch convert a folder of media to a specific profile template:

ls ‘C:\users\Public\Videos\Samples’ | Convert-Media -VC1IISSmoothStreamingSD480pVBR -TemplateBlackGlass -Output $home\desktop

This example runs all files in a folder through the Zune HD Profile for H.264 and outputs it to a directory.

Once the encoding is kicked off, you will see the progress in your PowerShell console.   It will display the current clip, progress percentage, the current pass and a progress bar will be displayed as well.

Now, you can get more complex and write some very handy PowerShell scripts to generate media in your own workflows! I love Powershell, and I’m looking forward to using this a lot in my own work.

He did a great job of digging through the API in Reflector and figuring things out quickly.

http://blogs.southworks.net/ejadib/2009/04/16/live-smooth-streaming-how-to-start-stop-shutdown-a-publishing-point-programmatically/

The nice part about this is that we had a scenario on one of our test servers where we wanted to constantly loop a video on a publishing point so that it appeared to be a Live stream (since in these economic times we were too cheap to set up a live encoder).  So E-Z (I call him that because he makes my life easy) used the tools in the Smooth Stream SDK to play back a 10 minute clip and restart the publishing point infinitely.

Check out this nice little site by Chris Pirazzi that my MediaRoom friend Joel Schonbrunn pointed me to.  Thanks Joel! Very handy.

http://lurkertech.com/lg/video-systems/

Alex Zambelli provides a fantastic overview of the the new features in Smooth Streaming and describes its architecture in detail.

There are some really amazing features in Smooth Streaming that I can’t wait to begin to take advantage of. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to edge cache the content using standard networking equipment that exists today. The files are not streamed in the traditional sense, but are actually progressive downloaded in small 2-second chunks via HTTP. This allows each little chunk to be cached independently as though it was just another image or file request.  So if someone in your neighborhood already asked for that chunk, it is probably still sitting in some local HTTP cache saving you a long trip back to the originating server.

In addition, the player uses logic to determine the network bandwidth and CPU load on the client machine, and it can choose which 2-second chunk to request next from a list of available files with appropriate bandwidths on the server.

The new file format for Smooth Streaming is based on an open ISO/IEC standard (ISO Base media file format) known as MP4.  The MP4 container allows for easy storage of these chunks that are required by Smooth Streaming.  You should read Alex’s post to understand the “box” nature of what is known as the “Fragmented MP4 File”.   Another thing I like about MP4 is there is lots of room for adding metadata about the “boxes”.  These new files also come with new file extensions to learn.  The .ismv and .isma files are the new extensions that you will see for these MP4 containers. 

One of the even more interesting aspects of Smooth Streaming is the server manifest file and the client manifest files.   These are XML files that are hosted along with the MP4 containers to describe the various tracks, available bitrates, and metadata about the files for a given presentation.

The server manifest (*.ism) is based on the SMIL 2.0 spec.  The advantage of this XML based manifest file is the ability to easily customize and extend the metadata available, and also the potential to dynamically generate the contents of the manifest for custom application needs. 

The use of RESTful Urls in Smooth Streaming makes it possible to seek into a file at a specific fragment using an absolute time value (100 ns units). 

http://video.foo.com/NBA.ism/QualityLevels(400000)/Fragments(video=610275114)

Now think about how handy that is, along with the tips from my previous post. You can now seek by SMPTE timecode using my TimeCode class to convert from a SMPTE 29.97 drop frame timecode to an absolute time in seconds, and then pass that to the Smooth Streaming server. 

Or you could create an EDL and dynamically generate the client manifest required to play back your edits without requiring a file to be transcoded again. Just send down the modified client manifest with the chunks in the order that you want them played back! All kinds of interesting possibilities.

Be sure to also check out the Getting Started page on the IIS site and the section on Managing Your Presentations.

The best way to download the beta is to use the Web Platform Installer.

This month I have been following the semantic technology work done by the /programmes team, the /music team (see previous post) and the Radio Labs team.

There’s nothing extremely groundbreaking with the concepts that they are employing. However, it is the combination of those concepts and their use in the domain space that is most interesting to me.  My team has been pushing for many of these same concepts within our own solution offerings for the Media & Entertainment sector as well.

The core concepts of the Linked Data initiative seem to be fundamental to a lot of the new media work being done by the BBC.  The rules of “linked data” in respect to Media assets and Digital Asset Management make a lot of sense.  It not only makes it easier to discover metadata about media, it also makes it easier to aggregate metadata from multiple sources, and easily discover such things as rights, copyright, and usage information. 

The four rules of Linked data are the following:

1. Use URIS as names for things. 
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a resource through its URI, provide them some useful information.
4. Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover more things.

Seems very simple, and in fact using these rules in designing a next generation Digital Asset Management solution is not very difficult (although there are some design issues that you should be aware of). 

Exposing the assets or “entities” via a well known URI is fundamental to the ability to link stuff together that was not originally designed or intended to be linked. Following these simple principles allows for easy “mesh-ups” for consumer and B2B oriented media metadata exchange.  By building asset management systems in such a fashion, it becomes much simpler to build out program guides, EPGs, content aggregation portals like Hulu, Joost, and the BBC iPlayer.

Another aspect of the BBC’s work that I am interested in is their use of OWL ontologies to define their domain model.  The Programmes ontology defines the vocabulary for how to describe a brand, series or episode on the BBC’s web properties.  Their ontology follows similar ones in the Semantic Web in that it reuses or imports vocabulary from existing well known ontologies such as Dublin Core and Friend of a Friend (Foaf).  This is the approach that I took with the development of the IMM Core ontology in the Interactive Media Manager (IMM) solution for Digital Asset Management.  Our domain model was based on the abstract model for MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration language which I will cover in a future posting. 

In the case of IMM, a lot of our URI designs followed rule #1, however we failed to provide the ability to effectively implement rules 2 and 3. Our URIs all begin with http://, but due to the nature of SharePoint being the underlying platform, we did not provide a simple way to make our resource URIs land on a page that showed meaningful data or links to related URIs.  This is something that should be simple to address in a future release. 

I really appreciate the way the BBC service is offering persistent URIs with the ability to adjust the serialization by adding a simple extension such as .xml, .yaml, .rdf, or .json to the end of the URI.  The BBC team’s underlying development should serve as a best practice for the media industry and will lead to the growth of the Semantic Web through linked data. I’d love to see all M&E companies begin to embrace these patterns.