We have been in Preview release for about 4 months now across 6 data centers and things are going amazingly well. Lots of great feedback and interest from around the globe. As we approach our first official general availability release later this Fall, we will be updating the Services SDK for .NET and our MSDN documentation with new sample code and scenarios.

Nick Drouin, one of the Program Managers on the Windows Azure Media Services, has just started up a new blog (http://blog-ndrouin.azurewebsites.net/) to post sample code and how-to articles around using various features of Media Services. Some of you may know Nick already from his work on IIS Transform Manager. This year he is responsible for many of our cool new features in Media Services such as Dynamic Remux – the ability to encode and store only a single set of standard MP4 multi-bitrate files and allow Media Services to dynamically serve out either Smooth Streaming or Apple HLS to client players. This feature will reduce your storage costs and simplify multi-screen and multi-format delivery. We will expand this feature to include MPEG-DASH support, as well as dynamic encryption for DRM in the future.

Check out the first set of articles that Nick has published on getting started with Media Services. He also is working on a post on how to use the Aspera On-Demand for Windows Azure that is now in beta on the Azure Marketplace.

Another feature that is coming soon is a set of updates to our Azure Portal experience to add even more support for Media Services directly in the Azure Portal. Keep an eye out for that later in the Fall.

As always, if you have any questions, please jump over to the Azure Forum for Media Services and post. I’m spending a lot more time over there answering questions lately. And if I miss a question due to my busy schedule, there are lots of knowledgeable folks on the team willing to help as well!

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Cloud+Cover/Episode-81-Windows-Azure-Media-Services

This media workflow, encoding, and content encryption tool was first released as a Beta at NAB 2011.  We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of our early adopters who provided great feedback and testing and the wider public for their input through our IIS Media Forum.   Over the last year, we have received great feedback, encoded and packaged tens of thousands of videos with customers in production, and received excellent feedback on our feature set which has helped us improve the software’s quality and stability.

We worked closely with our early adopter customers to make this product extremely robust and extensible for usage in real-world, high volume content production scenarios. Transform Manager, or TM as we call it, is being used by many content providers to encode, encrypt with PlayReady, and deliver to multiple formats including MP4, Smooth Streaming, and Apple HTTP Live Streaming. 

With this release behind us, many of you may already be aware that we are currently shifting our focus to the cloud. The new Windows Azure Media Services announced at NAB is our next major push, and you will begin to see this in action starting next week when we open the Preview up for the public. 

A lot of the learning, experience, and technology that went into making Transform Manager a scalable and extensible tool on-premises will be moved into a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that any Windows Azure developer can sign up for and take advantage of.  We have taken the knowledge from TM and re-architected it from the ground up to take advantage of the benefits and scale of cloud computing on Windows Azure.

As we move forward into the cloud, we will again look to our great community to give us continued feedback on the migration path from on-premises to cloud based encoding, encryption, and delivery of media. The transition won’t be immediate for all, but we see tremendous potential for handling media workflows that require spinning up a lot of resources quickly and cost-effectively for our customers.

For more information on the TM release, and what is coming soon please check out the following links:

• IIS Transform Manager 1.0, official page, feature list, and download links.
• Window Azure Media Services, our cloud-based media platform as a service.
• Microsoft Media Platform, providing on-premise solutions and client technologies.

We invite you to familiarize yourselves with these exciting new technologies and how they can meet media workflow needs: to complement or augment the capabilities offered by Transform Manager.

More details on Windows Azure Media Services coming next week, so continue to check back for updates. I’m looking forward to writing a lot more articles for you in the coming weeks.

Finally – here are the direct Download links for TM:

• IIS Transform Manager 1.0 (RTW) – 32 bit
• IIS Transform Manager 1.0 (RTW) – 64 bit

I am excited to finally be able to discuss what I have been working on this past year and explain why I have been so quiet on my blog for the most part.  I haven’t been able to discuss my project publicly for a long time outside of NDA conversations with partners and customers so this post is going to be a lot of fun for me.

About a year ago at NAB 2011, we began to discuss with customers and partners the idea of a set of platform level services in the cloud to enable the easy, flexible, and highly scalable delivery of media. The set of services that we envisioned would enable customers big and small to move their media production and streaming delivery workflows easily and securely from on-premises to a public cloud infrastructure. 

To that end, our team began to focus on the architecture and design of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on Windows Azure that would take the best components of the Microsoft Media Platform, including IIS Media Services, Expression Encoder, PlayReady, IIS Transform Manager, Audience Insight, Rough Cut Editor, our player and client frameworks for PC, Mac, Windows Phone, iOS, and Xbox, and combine them into a set of easy to use services sitting behind a RESTful API.

Last week at the National Association of Broadcaster’s convention, we finally announced Windows Azure Media Services.  This new collection of services coming soon to Windows Azure  simplifies the creation, management, and delivery of media to almost any device including Microsoft Xbox, Windows Phone handsets and Windows PCs, as well as non-Microsoft platforms such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, MacOS, iOS, and Android.  Content providers and media partners can take advantage of the cost benefits and cloud capacity found with Windows Azure, and provide customers massive amounts of digital media in the variety of formats they require, when they require it. Windows Azure Media Services’ ready-to-use services allow customers to simplify the creation of complex media workflows built on the Microsoft Media Platform and third-party technologies.

To learn more about Windows Azure Media Services and sign-up for the upcoming Preview, please click here.  We will be accepting sign ups for the next few weeks and will alert you as soon as the services are live for use.

For additional details on the announcement, please check out Scott Guthrie’s Blog (announce details, media partners, capabilities, architecture overviews, scenarios)

Or for press release information and partner information, head on over to the  Microsoft Cloud Virtual Press Room.

I’ll follow up with a number of blog posts as we get closer to Preview release.  After the Preview is live, I’ll be adding a set of technical posts and hot-to articles. 

Our newest PM team member in the Media Services team, Cenk Dingiloglu, posted a great how-to article on using our latest Smooth Streaming client for Windows 8 Beta.  

Check out the article here for a walkthrough on how to create a Metro application using the JavaScript language that plays back Smooth Streaming content on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. 

Watch out for the requirement to compile to a specific platform type (x64 or x86) instead of Any CPU or you will get some compiler errors there.

NAB is coming up next in April, and I should have some time again to get back to blogging about some very cool things that are coming soon!  I hope there is some sun in Vegas this year, as it has been very cloudy here in Redmond.

I particularly like the coverage of HLS and the fact that the Apple draft that was submitted to the IETF is merely an “informational draft” and the fact that there are no efforts underway to standardize that draft spec. This is an often overlooked reality of the HLS specification and something that I am constantly educating customers on.

The push to move to interoperable international standards is only going to get stronger in the next few years.  Embracing an interoperable version of MPEG DASH for both live and on-demand streaming, one that is based on a common file format like fragmented-MP4 (CFF file format from Ultraviolet is a good candidate here), and embracing MPEG Common Encryption (CENC) will be the key to making interoperable media services work across devices and clouds.

This is an article that we have been hoping to find the time to get out the door for a while and I’m very pleased to see this get published! 

In this article Mario walks through the process of hooking up a debugger to your custom ITask implementation and also how to inject custom arguments into your task for testing purposes.

Full URL to the article is here. http://blogs.iis.net/doiron/archive/2011/11/13/debugging-your-custom-iis-transform-manager-task.aspx

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.  UPDATE:Watch out for whitespace characters or tabs in front of the <?xml> processing instruction or it will cause errors.  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.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<smil xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language”>
<body>
<seq>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_1427.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_2056.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_230.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_2962.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_331.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_477.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_688.mp4″/>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_991.mp4″/>
<audio src=”ElephantsDream_audio.mp4″/>
</seq>
</body>
</smil>

If you have multiple language audio files, you can also use the systemLanguage attribute on the <audio> 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.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<smil xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language”>
<body>
<seq>
<video src=”ElephantsDream_1427.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_2056.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_230.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_2962.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_331.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_477.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_688.mp4″ />
<video src=”ElephantsDream_991.mp4″ />
<audio src=”ElephantsDream_SPA.mp4″ systemLanguage=”spa” />
<audio src=”ElephantsDream_audio-eng.mp4″ systemLanguage=”eng” />
</seq>
</body>
</smil>

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.

I’m pleased to post a trackback to a collection of blogs that Sam just published that offer guidance on how to troubleshoot all kinds of issues on IIS Media Services! Enjoy.

Part 1 (Basics)

Part 2 (Publishing Point UI and States)

Part 3 (Event Logs)

Part 4 (Performance Counters)

Part 5 (Client Manifest)

Part 6 (IIS Logs and Others)

Part 7 (Putting It Together)