Entries tagged with silverlight - Channel 10

New DeepZoom Poster Web Designers Will Love

sarahintampa — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:52:00 GMT

If you love Deepzoomable stuff as much as I do, you'll love this. The latest example of Silverlight’s cool DeepZoom technology can be found in action here on a poster created to “capture the organized chaos that is website design and development.” (Well, at least that’s what it does according to Shane Morris, a Microsoft User Experience Evangelist.) There’s really nothing much to the site, awebsitenameddesire.com, itself beyond some links to various web design-related conferences. It's the poster that is the main focal point. But still, wow - what a riot! It’s definitely one of those things you can explore forever, finding funny little details along the way. For example, look for the monkey on the rooftop, or, as Shane points out, the hilarious body language between the Graphic Designer, the Information Architect, and the Interaction Designer. If you want a copy of the poster for yourself, follow the user sitenameddesire on Twitter and stay tuned for an update.

Silverlight Books

sarahintampa — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:08:00 GMT

Are you interested in Silverlight developing and looking for some guidance? If so, you’ll definitely want to bookmark this resource: SilverlightBooks.net. The site helps developers, whether novices or experts, locate the books they need to learn about the new Silverlight technology. However, in addition to Silverlight books, you’ll also find some books on the general topic of .NET technologies, too. You can group books together by categories “Introductory,” “Beginner,” “Advanced,” and “Expert,” to better help you find the books that are on your level. There’s also a “Top Rated” category which features those that other users like the most. The site also features sections on industry news, development tools, training courses, jobs, and downloads, but unfortunately, these sections haven’t been filled out yet, although the site does announce they will be available soon.

Demo of Silverlight 2 scaling quality improvements

benwaggoner — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:03:00 GMT

My colleague Donald Karlov did a A/B compare for me showing the quality improvement for scaling between Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the new Silverlight 2 RC0. Check this detail of a shot from an encode I did of Big Buck Bunny, scaled to 2.5x (640x360 to 1600x900 – a pretty common scaling ratio for full-screen playback on a smaller LCD or a laptop).

Silverlight 1.0 through Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Silverlight 2 RC0 and later

Note the improvements in detail, and the elimination of some stray pixels at the edge of the butterfly wing. Most shots won’t be as dramatically improved, but all will be helped at least somewhat.

And even with the better quality, playback CPU load dropped by 10-15%, due to better perf in the scaler and decoder.

Silverlight 2 RC0 is out

benwaggoner — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:01:00 GMT

The first public release canditate (RCo) for Silverlight 2 is now available for download by developers. While anyone can install it, the main goal is for developers to make sure they aren't hit by any breaking changes for Silverlight 2 RTM so they can fix any issues. No one will be auto-updated to this release. Users will be auto-updated to Silverlight 2's final release when it's posted.

All Silverlight 1.0 projects should work fine, but there may be some Silverlight 2 Beta projects that require updates.

For the media folks, there's a couple of new things I want to mention.

There's a new scaling algorithm that's a lot faster and much higher quality - a nice compromise when you can get it!
Additional optimizations have been done for the VC-1 video decoder, so playback will be faster. The gains are biggest for content using B-frames.

Since the default Expression Encoder templates have "always on" scaling and its presets use B-frames by default, the above will provide a nice performance boost for existing content. The above are "always on" features - you don't need to update anything to take advantage of them. So expect smoother frame rates on lower-end machines.

Further information:

EDIT: Added ScottGu link

First MediaStreamSource example is up

benwaggoner — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:04:00 GMT

My colleague Larry Olson has posted the first public demo project for MediaStreamSource. This new Silverlight 2 feature enables file parsers and network protocols to be implemented in managed code inside of Silverlight, thus enabling support beyond the built-in native formats. Since MSS passes off the compressed media samples to the native decoders, it should offer nearly the same performance as a native code implementation (parsers aren't that expensive). But since it runs inside of the Silverlight managed code sandbox, support for new formats and protocols can be just added into player's .XAP package file, and will be completely transparent to the end user.

MediaStreamSource is one of the biggest enabling features in Silverlight 2. At IBC, people came up with all kinds of crazy, awesome, and even useful ideas of what to do with it beyond anything I'd ever imagined. Really, the only big limitation is that you can't use UDP packets, as they're not supported by the Silverlight networking stack.

Some people have had trouble finding the MSDN docs about MSS, so I'll list them here as well:

MediaStreamSource Class
MediaStreamSource Members

Expression Encoder Service Pack 1 preview

benwaggoner — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:19:00 GMT

James Clarke has a blog post up describing some of the new features in the forthcoming Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1.

It's got some great new stuff, and we're demoing it here at Streaming Media West this week.

Read the whole post - there's lots of good stuff in there. A couple of my favories are

A new Silverlight 2 base player using .NET. Among other things, this will enable players that display the video at 100% scale by default, improving quality and performance.
New A/B compare modes. Awesome stuff for high-touch encoding and codec tweaking
Some even more VC-1 advanced options for High Codec Nerditry.
The first public release of Microsoft H.264 compression technology.

Anyway, a lot of good stuff for a SP1. I'm looking forward to it.

H.264 and AAC support coming in Silverlight

benwaggoner — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:09:00 GMT

So, our big IBC press announcement went out this morning. Lots of blog-worthy stuff in there, but as a compression nerd, it's the codec stuff I'm going to talk about first.

The big news is that, yes, we're going to add support for MPEG-4 to Silverlight, in the version coming after the fast-approaching fall release of Silverlight 2. Specifically, this will be H.264 for video and AAC for audio.

Why?

So, why MPEG-4 support in Silverlight? It's pretty straightforward, really. We have customers with libraries of H.264 content they wanted to publish to Silverlight, but didn't want to reencode to VC-1. Silverlight's strengths go far beyond media playback, and customers wanted the choice to deploy a wide variety of existing content within Silverlight. Silverlight aspires to provide as much choice as feasible as to how Silverlight can be authored and delivered. H.264 support is something we'd considered for past versions, but there were higher priority features we needed to deliver first. Silverlight 2 provides us a very rich base for delivering web apps, so we can start spreading our wings a bit.

What?

We've got more technical details we'll be sharing at IBC and later, but today, I'll just quote the details from Scott Guthrie's interview:

PressPass: Will you be showing or announcing anything new at the IBC conference this week?

Guthrie: Yes. At IBC 2008 we will be demonstrating a technology preview of H.264 video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio playback support in Silverlight, and H.264 authoring using Microsoft Expression Encoder and Windows Server 2008 for delivery. Until now, Silverlight has supported the SMPTE VC-1 and Windows Media formats, as well as MP3 for audio, enabling customers to take advantage of broad support across the Windows Media ecosystem, including third-party tools, service providers and content delivery networks.

We’ve always wanted Silverlight to support a variety of formats, so today we’re announcing that H.264 and AAC support will be available in a future version of Silverlight, which will offer content owners greater flexibility and choice to deliver video and audio.

PressPass: Historically, people have associated Microsoft with VC-1. Does this signal a change in direction?

Guthrie: No. Although we have been working with VC-1 for some time, it’s not widely recognized that Microsoft has also been an active participant in the standardization of H.264/MPEG AVC for many years, and we’ve included H.264 support in several Microsoft products. Microsoft’s Gary Sullivan was the chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT), which developed the H.264 standard, and he recently accepted an Emmy Award on behalf of the JVT.

PressPass: Does this mean that Silverlight is moving away from Windows Media?

Guthrie: Not at all. This is about offering our customers more choice. Media producers and distributors around the world have enjoyed the high quality, flexibility and affordability of Windows Media formats for over a decade. As a testament to its pervasiveness, Windows Media can be found in almost every conceivable media scenario from desktop home video to feature films and TV broadcasts.

Again, don't read this as as a big change around our strategy for media formats. We've long-supported WMV and MPEG-4 side-by-side in products like Xbox and Zune. As I posted last week, Microsoft has been contributing to H.264 since its inception.

This doesn't represent any change in our support for Windows Media. Windows Media continues to work well for today's Silverlight customers. I expect (not a goal, just a prediction) that the majority of Silverlight content will remain in WMV well after we release MPEG-4 support.

In particular, VC-1 will likely remain the codec of choice for HD for some time. Comparing VC-1 Advanced Profile to H.264 High Profile with all the bells and whistles turned on, VC-1 only needs about half as many MIPS per pixel for playback. This won't matter as much for lower resolution content, or podcasting stuff that's in the simpler Baseline profile, but makes for a big reduction in system requirements for 720p and higher.

Where/When can I learn more?

If you're at IBC, swing by! If you want a head start on using MPEG-4 in Silverlight, feel free contact me directly. And we'll have plenty of more technical info to share down the road a bit.

Vídeo - A Microsoft Live Labs lança o Photosynth

Galileu — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:04:00 GMT

O Live Labs é o braço da Microsoft Research que faz pesquisa e desenvolvimento especificamente para a Internet. Do pessoal do Live Labs já saiu, por exemplo, o Deep Zoom, um componente de destaque do Silverlight 2.0. Agora, mais uma novidade do pessoal do Live Labs – o Photosynth está aberto para o uso de todos.

Para quem não conhece, o Photosynth é uma forma completamente inovadora de vivenciar as suas fotos digitais. Em vez de ver fotos individuais tiradas no mesmo local, o Photosynth consegue encaixar todas as fotos no seu lugar correto num espaço tridimensional. A tecnologia analisa as suas fotos, identifica os pontos de sobreposição e utiliza essa informação para reconstruir um espaço gráfico 3D e nele encaixar cada foto em seu devido lugar. O usuário não precisa fazer nada além de alimentar as suas fotos – o Photosynth cuida de tudo.

Existem algumas regras básicas para criar um bom synth, por isso recomendo ver o vídeo legendado desse post que mostra os passos iniciais. Depois, baixe o guia em português que entra em maiores detalhes com dicas importantes e assuntos para fotógrafos avançados.

O site do Photosynth utiliza Live ID para autenticação. Se você tem Hotmail ou usa o Windows Live Messenger, é o mesmo login e senha desses serviços. Lá, você terá direito a 20GB de espaço para armazenar os seus synths. Para usar o Photosynth é preciso instalar um plug-in de 8MB que roda em Internet Explorer 6 e 7 ou Firefox 2 e 3 para Windows XP e Windows Vista. O site permite comentários dos usuários, compartilhamento via link direto para o synth e, o mais bacana, você pode embed, ou incorporar, o synth no seu próprio site via iframe. É só copiar e colar o código.

Para o lançamento, estamos com vários parceiros produzindo conteúdo interessante. National Geographic, o governo federal americano, o governo nacional da Turquia, NASCAR, entre outros. Aqui no Brasil a Microsoft trabalhou com a agência Megaphoto e seu fotógrafo Rodrigo Acedo para testar a tecnologia. Eles produziram uns synths bem bacanas da Catedral da Sé e do Monumento às Bandeiras.

Catedral da Sé - São Paulo

Monumento às Bandeiras - São Paulo

Acho que todos vão achar o Photosynth bacana. Não se esqueçam de colocar tags nas suas fotos, e coloquem a tag Brasil para que o mundo possa encontrar nosso conteúdo bem fácil. Mais um detalhe, você pode marcar o geoposicionamento dos seus synths. Depois do synth aparecer no site, entre nele para editá-lo e lá aparecerá um ícone de um globo. Clique nele para ver o Virtual Earth e apontar no mapa o local de seu synth.

Dê um pulo no www.photosynth.com, veja os synths que estão lá e crie os seus próprios synths. Se encontrar ou criar algo bacana, mande aqui pra mim!

Get it now: Skyfire Mobile Browser + Silverlight

Larry — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:18:00 GMT

Skyfire delivers, just in time for the Olympics they let fly with Silverlight support on their Windows Mobile browser. If you haven't seen Skyfire, get up to date in this video from co-founder Nitin Bhandari at DEMO 08.

Skyfire gives Windows Mobile users a desktop experience with support for CSS, Ajax, QuickTime, Flash 9, and now Silverlight. The beta is for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 phones, and only for US phones right now.

And unfortunately Skyfire is a closed beta, but if you are one of the first 50 people to go to the sign-up page and enter the code "channel10" (no quotes) into the beta code field, you'll get to see what it's like.

Let us know what you think.

Alex Zambelli's blog is reborn with Olympics info roundup

benwaggoner — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Yikes! No posts since early July. I've been a bad, bad blogger. Fortunately, compression wizard Alex Zambelli's blog has relaunched to take up the slack!

He's started off with a series of Olympics posts.

NBC Olympics 24/7 - a great roundup of information and details

NBC Olympics video without Silverlight? - showing how to play back the Olympics without Silverlight on Windows (and why you'd want to use the Silverlight version if given a choice).

Why no full screen mode in the NBC Olympics player?, citing this silverlight.net forum discussion including information from our own Tom Taylor.

Hopefully he'll inspire me to get back at it...

Vídeo: Unwrap Mosaics - Editando vídeos como se fossem fotos

Galileu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:34:00 GMT

A Microsoft Research não tem o hábito de produzir produtos finais. As pesquisas que resultam nos softwares e serviços desenvolvidos pela MSR normalmente são embutidas em outros softwares da Microsoft, muitas vezes dentro do próprio sistema operacional Windows. Um exemplo recente é o Deep Zoom, que é um componente do Silverlight 2. O Deep Zoom foi desenvolvido pelo pessoal da Live Labs que é um braço da MSR para pesquisa e desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias para a Web.

Um evento onde sempre aparecem novidades da MSR é o SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), um evento anual voltado a inovações em gráficos e técnicas de interação. Nesse mesmo evento foram apresentados o Sea Dragon e o Photosynth, além de outros projetos da MSR. Esse ano o projeto da MSR que está chamando atenção é o Unwrap Mosaics. Para simplificar a explicação, o Unwrap Mosaics é um software de edição de vídeo que pega uma imagem 3D e abre ela em um plano 2D para facilitar a edição. Imagine um rosto que foi captado em 3D a qual você quer adicionar uma barba e bigode. Em vez de ter que ficar girando o rosto 3D na ferramenta de edição, o Unwrap Mosaics permite que você exponha o rosto inteiro numa superfície plana (2D) para poder editar a vontade, como se fosse uma foto normal. Após terminar a edição, ele retorna o vídeo a sua representação original em 3D com as novas edições. É mais fácil entender se você assistir o vídeo ao lado. Recomendo ver o vídeo em alta qualidade do Unwrap Mosaics - eles editaram o pescoço de uma girafa para subir e descer, ficou muito engraçado.

DeepLOL

sarahintampa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:29:00 GMT

We’ve talked in the past about Silverlight and Deep Zoom and have featured many creative uses of the technology including sites like HardRock.com, Europe’s One Big Weekend website, and even an Obama Deep Zoom. However, we have to admit that this latest Deep Zoom site we stumbled across beats anything we’ve seen before in terms of just being a really funny and clever use of Deep Zoom: DeepLOL. As you may have guessed from the title, this site is a deep zoom site of nothing other than lolcats. That’s right – lolcats, the crazy kitty pictures that are still one of the hottest memes on the internet today. The site features two of the most iconic lolcat images, which, if you zoom in on them, are revealed as being made up of hundreds and hundreds of other lolcat pictures. You could spend a long time on this site zooming in and out and moving around to see them all, so lolcat fans be warned before you click - it’s the best time waster ever.

MSN Toolbar Now With Olympics Tab & More

sarahintampa — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:54:00 GMT

The Silverlight-powered MSN Toolbar has recently been updated to include some new features. One of those new features is the addition of a Beijing 2008 Olympics tab, which will let you keep up with all the latest info from the upcoming games, including quick links to Olympics news, the latest medal counts, videos from the games, and links to all the various sports. In addition, there’s also a new MSN Videos tab and a new Stocks tab. The toolbar is for IE only and can be download for free from here.

(via/img via Redmond Pie)

Watch the Olympics Live now at NBCOlympics.com

Tina — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:50:00 GMT

Who needs DVR when you can watch the 2008 Summer Olympics Live at NBCOlympics.com. With over 2200 hours of live Olympic footage and more feature and profile pieces than you know what to do with...it's the place to be this summer. Using Silverlight 2.0 you can watch up to four live events at one time. I recruited Ex-BMX racer Eric Schmidt to give us a walk-thru of this superb user experience.

Deep Zooming with HardRock.com

Tina — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:10:00 GMT

Adam Kinney stops by the Channel 10 Studios and takes us through the HardRock.com memorabilia site. It's built with Silverlight and we've seem glimpses before but now we're bringing you the whole tour. Check out the finger prints of your favorite musicians, the tires on Bono's motorcycle and a letter from Madonna. Cool stuff people.

Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project

sarahintampa — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project began last year as a way to create a snapshot in time of the present-day geologic conditions at Yosemite National Park. Using gigapixel imagery, the goal was to construct a large scale image of the valley walls in high detail. The end result would aid research in the area of rockfall activity as well as become an asset to the park’s search and rescue operations. The shooting began in May of this year. To get the images, 70 photographers are hiking through the park with robotic cameras in tow which are positioned by GPS coordinates to take the shot. They even communicate via radio to synchronize when the shot is to be taken. Scoble has video about this project here.

Now Adam Kinney is reporting that the Silverlight Deep Zoom version of this site is live. Using the Deep Zoom feature built into Silverlight, you can zoom in and out of 45 gigapixels worth of Yosemite Park data. You have to try this! Go here. It’s incredible.

Oh and, Doug, you wanted to know where all the dope Silverlight demos were? Ha. We’ve got applications.

P.S. Tafiti and the Hard Rock Memorabilia site aren’t bad examples either.

Line Rider Goes Silverlight

sarahintampa — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:21:00 GMT

Have you heard of Line Rider? This game, or “toy” as it’s often called, was originally created back in 2006 as a fun little time-waster that simulated physics through the simple act of of drawing a line with your mouse on the screen. The object of the game is to draw one or more lines on the screen which a boy on his sled can “ride” after you push play. The line needs to be smooth or the boy will fall off his sled. Beyond that, there’s really no goal to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the addictive game became an internet hit and was featured by sites like Yahoo and Time Magazine. Recently, inXile Entertainment, the company that gained the rights to the game back in ‘06, made the decision to move the internet version of the game from Flash to Silverlight, which means that there’s now more consistent frame rate during playback that provides a faster, smoother ride. Want to check it out? You can waste a little time yourself by visiting the new web version of Line Rider here.

Silverlight Skinning in Flip4Mac

benwaggoner — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Much has been made of our making the Mac a first-class citizen of Silverlight. We build the Mac and Windows versions together, and release them simultaneously. We've intentionally structured Silverlight to minimize dependencies on the underlying hardware and OS, and carry around all our codecs inside the runtime.

What I haven't talked a whole lot about in too long is our support for authoring Silverlight video experiences on the Mac. While our own Expression Encoder 2 is Windows-only, we work with partners to provide WMV and VC-1 encoding on other platform. Telestream has been a great partner here, with their Flip4Mac QuickTime component and their Episode stand-alone compression tool (originally known as Compression Master, and which came along with their acquisition of Popwire).

Flip4Mac is a testament to both the portability of the Windows Media technologies and the flexibility of Apple's QuickTime architecture. It works as a QuickTime component, enabling QuickTime to play Windows Media content like any other supported format, with full access to all of QuickTime's features like hardware accelerated full-screen playback (all supported in the free version). For example, in the QuickTime Pro Properties window:

Looks just like any other QuickTime file. Even the ASF metadata shows up.

Flip4Mac also supports content authoring in the paid version, as well as import into content creation apps like Final Cut Pro. It's got pretty deep control, even exposing features like B-Frames that'd take a registry key with Windows Media Encoder.

So, how about a quick walkthrough through the Flip4Mac encoding settings?

Flip4Mac is accessed like any other exportable format from QuickTime (like MPEG-4). It also comes with a bunch of presets for typical scenarios.

It has the normal set of basic video export features you'd expect, nicely Macified. I appreciate the "Size: Current" so I don't have to always type in the frame size of the source when I'm not scaling.

The Advanced button reveals some deeper options, including a complexity control for speed/quality tradeoffs and B-Frame distance. You can also set Flip4Mac to deinterlace interlaced sources, or pass interlacing on through to the final encode. Since it can both encode and decode interlaced VC-1, Flip4Mac can be a great way to transfer editable 480i video sources over slow connections. It can match DV quality in 20% the data rate.

For Silverlight audio, Flip4Mac supports both WMA 9 Standard and 9 Professional. It doesn't encode the 32-96 Kbps WMA 10 Pro low bitrate modes that Silverlight 2 will be able to decode, but does have the full variety of WMA encoding modes.

And the coolest new feature of Flip4Mac: built-in Silverlight templates! This lets you build a complete Silverlight player (using Expression Encoder templates we provided) directly from any app that support QuickTime export.

Obama Deep Zoom

Larry — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Donavon West, a regular on Channel 9 and also the man behind HomeServerHacks.com, has created a gigapixel Deep Zoom from Obama supporter thumbnails - 12,000 to be exact, spread across a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel photo of Barack Obama. Some of the images are higher res than others (higher res images seem to stand out a little more than the others even at a distance), check out the high res photo on his left eye.

See more at DeepZoomObama.com

Announcing Expression Encoder Customer Panel

benwaggoner — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:29:00 GMT

The Silverlight and Expression teams are very customer focused, and we like to release products on a fast cadence. We've got a lot of methods of customer outreach, and I'm happy to share a new one, the Expression Encoder Customer Panel.

David Sayed has all the details over on his blog:

Expression Encoder Customer Panel

Now that Expression Encoder 2 has been released, the team is hard at work on the next version of the product.
We want to be as responsive to community feedback as possible, and would like to set up a panel of customers with whom we can have ongoing conversations.

What is the Customer Panel?

The Customer Panel is a way for us to build strong relationships with users of our product. We'll use it as a way to understand your needs, workflows as well as how you use the product. We'll also use it to float future feature ideas and get feedback on them

What is the time requirement?

The Customer Panel is an ongoing project. The overall impact should be minimal and if at any point you no longer want to participate, just tell us. Typically we'll aim to reach out the Panel every couple of months or so. There may some times when we reach out more frequently.

How is this different to a Technology Adoption Program (TAP)?

TAPs are for specific releases and focus on getting you pre-releases of the software to play with. We'll use the same framework for the Customer Panel, but it is longer lived and goes beyond a particular release. This is an opportunity to have lasting impact on product direction.

OK sign me up!

If you want to take part, please send me an email by clicking Steve Clayton blogged about DeepEarth, and I would be neglectful if I didn’t pass this link on to you. DeepEarth is, in one word, incredible. And it really shows off what Deep Zoom is capable of. The DeepEarth project was an open source community effort that was meant to be a learning experience for the participants as well as a way to show off Silverlight 2’s Deep Zoom capabilities in something both cool and useful. The result is a deep zoomable world map featuring imagery from Microsoft Virtual Earth. You can watch a video on YouTube about DeepEarth or you can just watch the video I made.

[Update: Also check out http://silverlight.idvsolutions.com/, Thanks Scott]

Good article about the Olympics in Silverlight

benwaggoner — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:31:00 GMT

Max Bloom has written a good article about NBC Universal''s upcoming Olympics broadcasts in Silverlight.

Read the article yourself, but here's a few choice quotes from it:

"NBCU plans to offer 3,600 hours of live programming from Beijing. That’s 212 live hours for each of the 17 days of the Olympics... In addition to the sheer volume of live content to be delivered—three times what was offered in 2004— what’s notable is that most of NBCU’s live programming—2,200 hours—will be delivered online at NBCOlympics.com."
"The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing will mark the arrival of streaming as a viable alternative to the Olympics’ television broadcast. This summer, NBCOlympics.com will offer 4,400 hours of on-demand streaming in addition to its 2,200 hours of live programming, making the Beijing Olympics the most ambitious streaming media project in history."
"To help meet that challenge, the NBCOlympics.com player offers a “metadata overlay” feature, which allows the player to display transparent data and navigation tools over the video window. This enables users to access statistics and other data without covering up, pausing, or leaving the primary video display. For example, play-by-play announcers’ dialogue can be keyed into an XML data stream, then rendered as a timecoded, scrolling text caption that transparently overlays the bottom of the video display. The player also enables the TiVo-like experience of pausing, rewinding, and replaying content, and these two features together allow viewers to use either the timecode or the play-by-play captioning to rewind to a specific point in the on-screen action and replay it."
"A slew of DRC-Stream software and encoder boards from Canada-based Digital Rapids are being deployed in Beijing to populate NBCOlympics.com’s encoding farm, but other than committing to VC-1, NBCOlympics.com has yet to confirm encoding bitrates, frame rates, or frame sizes. (Without offering more specifics, Miller says NBCOlympics.com will be streaming through a managed bitrate solution to optimize the user’s connection, with a target maximum bitrate of 650KB/sec.) Digital Rapids is also supplying software to enable transcoding from other digital media formats into VC-1.Miller promises hundreds of hours of online HD video..."

Note that there's already a bunch of content up at NBCOlympics.com if you want to get an early taste of what's in store on 8/8/08.

Silverlight Mobile with John L Scott Real Estate

Nic — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:14:00 GMT

Lennox Scott, Chairman and CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate and Sam Chenaur, Microsoft Platform Strategy Advisor, join me in the studio to talk about Silverlight on the mobile device and it's application in the Real Estate industry.

Sam walks us though a proof of concept (POC) Silverlight mobile app for John L. Scott Real Estate developed by Microsoft partner, Dr. Neil Roodyn, with the assistance of Loke Uei Tan from the Windows Mobile group.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is out!

benwaggoner — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:39:00 GMT

After months of hard work, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and its SDK are now available for download!

The best overall description of what's in it is in this post from Scott Guthrie.

Media Features in Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Of course, my focus is on the media features. New to Beta 2 is:

Hooks to enable adaptive streaming

Beta2 adds client support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables managed code to be able to pull in media files and streams from arbitrary URLs, and then reassemble them and pass them off to the video and audio decoders. This can enable a whole lot of different ways to address how to make media available, including supporting seamless streaming switching between content encoded at different bitrates. And since this is all running inside managed code, a CDN or content provider can tune the heuristics used to get the optimal content from the optimum server.

While the API is in place, we don't have any full end-to-end demos for how this works at the moment; you'll be seeing a variety of ways to use this technology down the road. Since our API is so flexible, I imagine customers and partners will find all kinds of fun things to do with it.

Content Protection

Beta2 includes client sideWindows Media DRM 10 and PlayReady DRM support. Both work cross browser and cross platform. Note that WMDRM10 will require a PlayReady license server (available in the coming weeks); existing content will work with Silverlight, but with the new license server.

Server Side Playlists

Beta2 adds improved support for server side playlists on Windows Media Services (previous releases only supported client-side playlists). That's still a feature in development (we are still a beta), so if you have server-side playlists that aren't working as you expect, it'd be great if you could put a link in comments, or email them directly to me so we can see what's going on. Note that web playlists from the IIS 7.0 Media Pack have always been fully supported.

Quality and Performance improvements

While there's no API change here, Beta 2 includes a variety of improvements to both performance and quality (particularly scaling quality) during media playback. Full-screen playback in particular is improved.

Windows Media Audio 10 Professional

And don't forget that Silverlight 2 adds support for the WMA 10 Pro codec. This isn't changed from Beta 1, but it's a big improvement compared to the stock WMA in Silverlight 1. WMA 10 Pro in the 32-96 Kbps range is what we call the "LBR" or Low Bit Rate mode, which is up to 2x as efficient as classic WMA. Audio is quite understandable at 32 Kbps, danceable at 48, an flawless at 64-96. Expression Encoder 2 supports the new modes, and Windows Media Player 11 can play them back as well.

For Silverlight 2-only projects, WMA 10 Pro is the codec of choice for any kind of bandwidth constrained content. And, of course, it's supported in Expression Encoder 2.

Also, note that, like WMA, WMA 10 Pro also supports 2-pass VBR encoding, which can help quality further when doing progressive download. 48 Kbps average 96 Kbps peak can sound pretty great.

I'll try to get up some A/B comparison demos in the next few days.

What a difference a half-decade makes! Live VC-1 today and at launch

benwaggoner — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:11:00 GMT

A recent conversation over at the Streaming Media Advanced list sparked a rant from me about the importance of comparing implementations of codecs, not just codecs.

To that end, I thought I'd do a demo to show how much improvement there's been in Windows Media since the launch of Windows Media 9 Series back in 2003.

A recent conversation over at the Streaming Media Advanced list sparked a rant from me about the importance of comparing implementations of codecs, not just codecs.

To that end, I thought I'd do a demo to show how much improvement there's been in Windows Media since the launch of Windows Media 9 Series back in 2003.

Below, you'll find two streams, encoded with the same settings but with tools from different eras. The streams are both

Live encoding from a preprocessed file (so that preprocessing differences don't matter)
And yes, it's the "Lady Washington" footage again.
640x360
29.97 fps
600 Kbps video
64 Kbps 44.1 stereo WMA audio
5 second buffer
Keyframe every 5 seconds

The difference is that the first is encoded with the original Windows Media Video 9 codec (ala just Windows Media Player 9 installed, like a stock Windows XP SP2 machine), and the second with the VC-1 Encoder SDK implementation in Expression Encoder 2. Pretty dramatic differences, I hope!

	Live Windows Media 2003	Live Windows Media 2008
Silverlight embedded page	2003 in Silverlight	2008 in Silverlight
Direct link to WMV (right-click to download)	2003 direct WMV link	2008 direct WMV link

...reminding me that I really need to blog how to make a Silverlight dual media player that can play two versions of the same clip in sync.

So, what makes this big difference? There's been a huge amount of work and three major releases (Format SDK 9.5 and 11, and VC-1 Encoder SDK) since then, so I won't give a complete list, but a few of the highlights.

4-way threading instead of 2-way threading, doubling performance on modern machines.
Lots of SSE2 and SSE3 optimizations to improve performance.
"Adaptive Complexity" that dynamically adjusts the complexity of the encoder, to make sure it's always using all available CPU power, without ever dropping frames. This compares to the old default live complexity of 1 (out of a 0-4 range).
Using B-frames (supported in the old decoder, but not used in the original encoder) which improve compression efficiency and enable efficient encoding of flash frames.
Lookahead Rate Control, where the codec buffers a few frames into the future, so it knows when it needs to start saving some bits for an upcoming keyframe, or when it's save to use a lot of bits on a few challenging frames.

A lot of the above are about performance. With offline encoding, better performance just makes for faster encoding. But for live encoding, it helps quality, because it allows the codec to do more math per pixel to find the optimum way to encode that file.

So, how big a difference is this? Below is a graph showing the Quantization Parameter (QP) for the two encodes. QP is a measure of how encoded each frame is, with higher values more highly compressed. In VC-1, the range is 0-31. A good rule of thumb is that QP of much below 8 looks pretty good, and QP of 8 or above...won't. Now, a live SD encode at 600 Kbps is pretty darn aggressive, so there's plenty of spots where both encodes certainly show artifacts. And quality varies a lot throughout the file as the the complexity of the video goes up and down, as this is a Constant Bitrate (CBR) encode. Note the relatively low QPs near the end of the file, where the easy credits scroll comes in.

But still, the modern VC-1 implementation (in red) with all of the above is dramatically better. While the old encoder (in blue) spikes all the way up to the maximum QP of 31, the new one is typically several QP lower, and maxes out at a QP of 20 instead.

That said, man, my Excel-fu sure has declined over the years. Hard to believe I used to teach classes on making good-looking Excel charts back in the early 90's. Anyway, just remember that lower is better, and red is our current stuff.