Category Archive

Today, I am pleased to announce the release of Beta 1 of the Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK 1.0.

The IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK provides application developers the capability to mux encoded video and audio elementary streams into Smooth Streaming fragmented-MP4 format that is compliant with the Smooth Streaming Format and Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) specifications. The IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK includes a native C++ static library that can be linked into your applications to support the muxing of fragmented-MP4 into files or sent live via HTTP POST to a server running Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and IIS Media Services 3.0. The SDK is available for download here – Download IIS Smooth Streaming.

Documentation for the SDK can be found online here – IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK MSDN documentation and the release notes are available here – IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK Beta 1 Release Notes.

The primary purpose of the IIS Smooth Streaming Format SDK is to enable developers to create applications that can generate PIFF compliant Smooth Streaming formatted fragmented-MP4 files for use in video-on-demand and live streaming scenarios. In addition, the SDK can be used to encrypt content using standard AES encryption as required by the PIFF specification (this SDK only supports the PlayReady specific protection headers).

It is expected that the video and audio encoding functionality is done externally from the SDK.  Encoding for VC-1 can be accomplished by using the Microsoft VC-1 Encoder SDK – Professional. If you wish to do H.264 encoding, you will need to acquire a 3rd party H.264 encoding SDK and AAC audio encoder.  There are lots of encoding library choices available both free and commercial. 

The components of the SDK include:

1. A static-linked packaging library ssfsdk.lib, along with appropriate header files, that delivers f-MP4 wrapping capability to an application for use with the following video and audio codec combinations:
   • Closed GOP encoded VC-1 with Elementary Stream Sequence Headers and WMA Pro, or WMA audio
   • H.264 (avc1) and AAC-LC audio
2. Sample source code for a basic on-demand muxing application that uses DirectShow to source from files.
3. Link to online MSDN documentation.

The key features of this Beta 1 release of the Smooth Streaming Format SDK are:

• Support for Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) compliant fragmented-MP4 file output.
• Support for ISO Base Media (ISO/IEC 14496-12:2008) spec compliance.
• Support for muxing live and on-demand content.
• Support for appropriate header boxes and formatting required for live streaming using IIS Media Services.
• Support for AES-CTR encryption of VC-1 encoded content for use with PlayReady licensing servers and Silverlight 3.0 or higher.
• Support for writing out a compliant server manifest files.
• Support for writing out a compliant client manifest files.

To give you a peek at the roadmap, some upcoming features planned for Beta 2 include:

• Subsample encryption support for encrypting H.264 content in compliance with PIFF 1.1
• Multi-language audio muxing
• Text tracks
• Sparse streams
• A sample for live streaming

NOTE: Beta 1 of the SDK is provided for evaluation purposes and for use in testing your Smooth Streaming encoding implementations. Beta 1 does not currently give you a “Go-Live” license, so you will need to wait until Beta 2 if you plan to use this in production.

If you have questions on how to use this SDK in your applications, comments, or feedback on the SDK please send them to me directly or to smooth@microsoft.com. 
We are looking forward to incorporating your feedback and ideas into the Beta 2 release.

Resources

• Download the Protected Interoperable File Format specification
• Download the IIS Smooth Streaming Transport Protocol Specification
• Download IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 2
• More Information on Smooth Player Development
• API documentation for Smooth Streaming Player SDK
• More Information on Smooth Streaming
• More Information on Live Smooth Streaming
• Supporting documentation on getting started  with Smooth Streaming
  • Smooth Streaming for IIS 7.0 – Getting Started
  • Live Smooth Streaming for IIS 7.0 – Getting Started
  • Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide
  • Building your first Smooth Streaming Player using SSME

I just learned about this  fantastic way to run a second copy of Windows 7 on your Win 7 developer workstation and have a dual boot setup.

The new virtualization technology in Windows 7 allows you to create a VHD drive as a secondary boot drive, and then run that as a virtual disk with full access to your hardware and devices. I love this, as I often run lots of beta software, including latest bleeding edge builds of Visual Studio and other media software that over time can just kill my main home or office workstation. Now I can just set up a VHD with a copy of Windows 7, add a differencing disk and then mess it up all I want, then delete the differencing disk and reboot the machine and I’m back to a clean installation.

In order to set this up, I followed the steps documented in the guide that is distributed along with this great PowerShell 2 script called Install-WindowsImage. 

The documentation for this handy PowerShell script walks you through how to set up a fresh VHD in Windows 7, and how to load a Windows Image onto that VHD.

I’m going to create VHD’s for both Windows 7 and Server R2 so that I have fresh environments to try out new things in!

Also you might want to check out the WIM2VHD project that is also available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd

The Windows Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) command-line tool can be used to automate many of the steps above.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft got together recently and agreed on something.  It’s a small thing, but it has a lot of impact nonetheless. 

What did they decide upon?  Well, it’s actually a small little bit of semantic reasoning that web masters can now add to their pages to provide better search engine results.

It’s a simple link tag with the “rel” set to “canonical” like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com"/>

What it does is stop duplicate content on the web.  A rather small, but notable step towards adding semantics to web pages.

Read more here