John Deutscher » Transform Manager

IIS Transform Manager Beta – Using the MP4 to Smooth Task

John Deutscher — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:15:32 +0000

With the latest release of the IIS Transform Manager Beta, we added a new “task” and Job Template to convert from standard MP4 files (non-fragmented) to Smooth Streaming format files (fragmented MP4). The benefit of this new task is that you can use a lot of existing encoders on the marketplace that allow you to generate regular MP4 files and then easily convert those to Smooth Streaming format for delivery in IIS Media services 4.0.

To use the new MP4 to Smooth Task you need to start out with a set of multi-bitrate encoded MP4 files that meet the requirements for Smooth Streaming encoding:

That means you can use your favorite encoder that can generate H264 and AAC MP4 files (there are a lot of those out there!) as long as you make sure to set them up to create GOP aligned (or Coded Video Sequence aligned for you fellow video nerds) files.

To do that you need to stick to some advanced settings in your H264 encoding tools:

Make sure that if you switch framerates at lower resolutions, you only use EXACT half framerates of your upper resolutions (for example 29.97 and 14.985)
Set you KeyFrame Min and Max distinance to 2 Seconds per your framerate
Disable any forced I-frames at Scene cuts. Usually this is referred to as scene detection or –no-scenecut in x264
If you are using X264, output your stats file from your first pass and feed it into your second pass.

For example, the following settings worked for me when I used X264 to generate MP4 files using an AVISynth script.

x264.exe –pass 1 –bitrate 2962–ssim –output NUL –profile high –preset slower –tune film –stats ".stats" –keyint 48 –min-keyint 48 –no-scenecut ElephantsDream.avs

x264.exe –pass 2 –bitrate 2962–ssim –output "MP4\%~n1_2962.mp4" –profile high –preset slower –tune film –stats ".stats" –keyint 48 –min-keyint 48 –no-scenecut ElephantsDream.avs

After you have your folder of .MP4 files you can then use the new Watch Folder called “MP4 Video Files files to H.264 Smooth Streams” that is available in the IIS Transform Manager Beta.

Just Enable and Start this new Watch Folder after modifying the Folder Path that you want to use for it.

Next click Explore Watch Folder in the Actions menu (or right click and select Explore Watch folder). This will open the Watch folder up in Explorer view.
Before we drag our files into this view, we first need to create a “playlist” XML file in SMIL 2.0 format that will be used by Transform Manager to bind the MP4 files that you drop into the folder into a single Smooth Streaming package.

To do this, open up your favorite XML editor and create a basic SMIL 2.0 file with a <body> and <seq> element. Inside the <seq> element you list the <video> or <audio> tracks that you wish to use from your MP4 files.
You simply point the Video element’s “src” attritbute to your multiple MP4 source files and the audio element to the specific MP4 file that contains the audio track you want to use in the remux.

http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language">

If you have multiple language audio files, you can also use the systemLanguage attribute on the element to set the language tag that will be used in the Smooth Streaming manifest. For example, the playlist below uses the systemLanguage attribute to add a Spanish and English audio track.
This will generate two separate .isma audio tracks and the appropriate manifest entries in the Client and Server manifests.

http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language">

Finally, you drag all of your MP4 files and your new XML playlist into the Watch Folder to kick off the remux job.

After a short period of time the Job Monitor will show the progress of the conversion.

You can select the Activity Log tab in the Job Details panel to see the detailed progress log.

After the job has finished and you will be able to locate your job in the Finished folder in the Job Monitor view of Transform Manager.

Just double click on the row for your Finished job and it will open up the location of the Finished Folder for your Job ID that will contain your generated Smooth Streaming content. If you want to automate the copying of the output content to a final location on disk, or to another server you can add the RoboCopy Task to the default MP4 To Smooth Job Template and supply the location details on where you want your copy to go.

The new MP4 to Smooth makes it very simple to use a lot of existing encoding software that supports standard MP4 files with H.264 and AAC to generate Smooth Streaming content quickly and easily. This can also be handy when you need to generate MP4 files for HTML 5 progressive download playback in browsers, and also want to quickly and easily add Adaptive HTTP Streaming with Silverlight.

IIS Transform Manager custom task for X264 encoder

John Deutscher — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:18:01 +0000

I was really excited to see this recent blog post by Geoff Cox of SouthWorks. He has taken our IIS Transform Manager Task API and created an custom Task for using the open source X264 encoder via the CLI (command line interface).
This is very cool, as there are essentially two very popular H.264 encoding libraries available in the marketplace. One of them is a commercial product that is licensed via Main Concept, and the other is the X264 library which was originally developed by Laurent Aimar. If you check the Doom9 forums, there is a lot of discussion on which is faster and better. I won’t comment there, and I would note that some of the comparisons up there are old now.

There are also a number of other ones out there built by professional encoder ISV’s but the X264 one is very popular with open source encoding applications like HandBrake and FFmpeg. X264 is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License ( so consider that a warning if you plan to use it – depending on your usage scenarios and legal requirements).

X264 is compatible with Smooth Streaming since it can generate closed GOP output by default. Only next step is to create multiple GOP aligned output streams at different bitrates and then remux them into fragmented MP4 format. We’ll have an answer to the remux from MP4 to Smooth issue soon.

The exciting part about this post from Geoff is that it shows how simple it is to create a custom task for Transform Manager and integrate it into the workflow with IIS Media Services. Currently the task that he has could be extended to support FFMPEG also with some minor tweaking. It could also be used to later generate Smooth Streaming content directly via FFmpeg or X264 once we ship the new MP4 to Smooth conversion task that we are creating for the IIS Media Services 4.0 release in October.

Here’s the direct link to the blog article by Geoff with the source code for the custom task.

http://blogs.southworks.net/geoff/2010/08/14/x264-encoding-with-iis-transform-manager/

IIS Media Services 4 Beta 1 – Encode once & deliver to (more-than) three screens across multiple file formats & protocols

John Deutscher — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Today begins the next wave of updates to IIS Media Services. We released our first beta of Media Services 4 which includes the new support for live and on-demand streaming to Apple devices including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad using the same encoded elementary streams that are targeted at your Silverlight clients. We have also added a number of improvements to IIS Live Smooth Streaming to Silverlight. In this post, I’ll quickly cover all of the new stuff we released today, point you to our new walkthroughs and give you a preview of the upcoming features and more in-depth walkthroughs we are planning.

IIS Media Services 4 Beta 1- Now with iPhone and iPad streaming support!

IIS Smooth Streaming has been the leading platform for broadcasting live events using adaptive HTTP streaming on the internet. It was first used to deliver the 2008 Summer Olympics, and more recently was used for the 2010 Winter Olympics, March Madness, and the 2010 French Open.

The new capabilities of Media Services 4 will extend the reach of these live events to even more devices using the same set of encoded elementary streams. We can now encode a spectrum of bitrates in H.264 and AAC-LC in IIS Smooth Streaming format, push them to the IIS Server and deliver out to Silverlight clients on Mac, PC and Linux, Windows Phone 7, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Nokia s60, Broadcom and Intel set-top-boxes. That’s an incredibly wide range of screens to hit with a single set of multi-bitrate streams! IIS Media Services will simply unwrap the incoming fragmented-MP4 containers, extract the encoded H.264 and AAC-LC elementary streams, and re-packing them inside MPEG-2 Transport Stream containers for delivery to Apple devices. This means that you only encode the content once, and IIS handles the “packaging” of that content for distribution to multiple endpoints. For you Seinfeld fans out there, you can think of this process as “re-gifting” to your Apple friends, although this is definitely not a “label maker”. I’ll be posting guidance soon on how to broadcast to all of these screens using a range of encoding settings and bitrates.

Expression Encoder 4 Pro, which launched earlier this week and will be available for purchase at the Microsoft online store, also includes new templates for broadcasting live H.264 streams to IIS Media Services for delivery to multiple device profiles including the iPhone, iPad, and Nokia devices. For an introduction to Live Smooth Streaming with EE4, check out Sam Wookey’s blog post and walkthrough.

New! Transform Manager

In addition we are launching a new feature of IIS Media Services called Transform Manager, which provides simple integrated video encoding and batch conversion of video files to IIS Smooth Streaming format and the MPEG-2 Transport Stream adaptive streaming format supported by Apple devices. Transform Manager also integrates directly with Expression Encoder 4 Pro to allow you to use “watch folders” to queue up multiple encoding jobs on your server and deliver them directly to IIS Media Services 4 web folders as IIS Smooth Streaming presentations, complete with Silverlight player templates.

Transform Manager can also convert your IIS Smooth Streaming presentations directly into MPEG-2 Transport Streams and .m3u8 manifests for delivering content to Apple devices. We ship Transform Manager with several example Job Templates and Watch Folder configurations that enable you to drag-and-drop WMV and MP4 files into watch folders (or set up FTP or WebDav on your IIS server to upload content to your watch folders) and Transform Manager will automate the encoding to Smooth Streaming file format using Expression Encoder 4 Pro, transmux the output from EE4 to MPEG-2 Transport stream and create .m3u8 playlists, and then copy your generated media files to a uniquely named IIS web site for immediate playback.

We have also released a new SDK with Transform Manager so that you can write your own plug-in “tasks” that can be used with Transform Manager to support custom actions, third-party encoders, or your own encoding applications.

This alpha release of the Transform Manager feature currently only supports operating on a single IIS server and uses the local Task Scheduler for job management. In our future releases, we will be expanding the capabilities of the scheduler to support scaling-out Transform Manager.

IIS Smooth Streaming Client 1.0 RTW

Also released today is the IIS Smooth Streaming Client 1.0 RTW. This is the development kit that most of you already refer to as the SSME (Smooth Streaming Media Element). It is the core component that enables Smooth Streaming support for Silverlight clients. The Silverlight Media Framework 2.0 is built on top of this component. The new client development kit enables developers and designers to custom Silverlight players from the ground-up. You can build custom players that support full DVR-style time shifting, live ad insertion, multiple camera angles, closed captioning, and custom metadata tracks.

If you use the new Silverlight Media Framework (smf.codeplex.com) you get all of theses great features built into an open source player that you can extend upon. The new SMF 2.0 player has a more modular architecture, supports Timed Text Markup Language text tracks, support for VAST and MAST, support for the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework and a plug-in API .

IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK 1.0 Beta 2

And there is more! The IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK 1.0 Beta 2 will be released to the web next week. This SDK is provided as a C++ static library for building in support to your own encoder applications for muxing IIS Smooth Streaming and PIFF 1.1 compliant streams, and also delivering to IIS Media Services. This update includes bug fixes to the Beta 1 features plus the following additional features:

Muxing of properly-encoded VC-1 and H.264 video to PIFF 1.1 compliant output for live and On-demand.
Creation of PIFF 1.1 compliant manifest files
Support for PlayReady sub-sample encryption to support encrypted H.264
Multi-language audio muxing support
Text-streams to allow for creation of Timed Text Markup Language tracks

Coming soon…

Even with all of these great releases and new features, the team refuse to stop for breath (hey, there is no Summer in Seattle this year anyways, so let’s just keep working on new features!). Coming later this year you will see the following additional features added to IIS Media Services.

The Apple HTTP streaming support will expand to include AES encryption, DVR “sliding window” support and segmented archives similar to the standard Smooth Streaming support in Media Services to bring parity across both features. We will be doing the work necessary to make sure that everyone can broadcast to all their devices 24/7 if desired.
Multicast Smooth Streaming. Yes, it is coming… be patient.
PlayReady DRM will be built into IIS Media Services and the Transform Manager to provide easy-to-use and highly robust content protection for live and on-demand Smooth Streaming to Silverlight clients. You will be able to simply click a check box on your publishing point to enable encrypted Live broadcasts, and Transform Manager will batch-encrypt your on-demand files for use with PlayReady DRM, or the Apple spec supported simple AES encryption (which is not a DRM system, just a wire line encryption – so keep that in mind.)
Transform Manager scale-out will be supported through integration with a new scalable scheduler architecture. We will also be expanding our API to support integration with the task editing user interface to allow custom task developers to implement their own task setup and editing user interfaces.
More Walkthroughs! I’ll be working on expanding our walkthroughs for both the iPhone/iPad broadcasting, Transform Manager API usage, Transform Manager integration with 3rd party encoders, using TTML, multi-language audio support, and new metadata support in Media Services.

Resources

Get the new IIS Media Services bits now using the Web Platform Installer link here!

New Walkthroughs:
Transform Manager Walkthrough
Live Broadcasting to iPhone and iPad with IIS Media Services Walkthrough

For more details on this release of IIS Media Services, check out the following links: