Entries tagged with live - Channel 10

FrameIt: Photos Delivered to your Digital Photo Frames

brianjo — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:39:00 GMT

Ever since digital photo frames came available, I've been dreaming of the day you could make them more useful by displaying more dynamic content on them. Now Windows Live FrameIt makes getting this content to your digital photo frames easy and fun. FrameIt allows you to choose data from a number of set sources, or it lets you add your own RSS feeds to a collection that can be picked up automatically by your digital photo frame. Sources include learning sites, digital photo collections, news and information sites, entertainment sites, and your own RSS feeds.

If you don't have a digital photo frame that supports FrameIt, you can still use the RSS feed generated by the program to pull the data into a screen saver or any other RSS reader for a similar effect. Also be sure to check out the FrameIt blog to get more details and updates about the product.

Games For Windows LIVE is Now FREE

Nic — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:11:00 GMT

Kevin over at Gamerscore Blog has the details:

I love getting achievements when I play games. I love having the same friends list shared between my PC games and my XBOX 360. And I love not having to pick games from a list of servers, but just having matchmaking that puts me into a game. And today, we made some announcements that are going to make that much more common in Windows games... Games for Windows – LIVE – our online multiplayer gaming service for Windows, now offers completely free multiplayer. No exceptions – multiplayer is completely free, even cross-platform gameplay with XBOX 360 users.

Full post: http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2008/07/22/560107.aspx

More info: http://www.gamesforwindows.com/live

Low Latency webcasting with Windows Media and Siverlight

benwaggoner — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:25:00 GMT

So, Streaming Media is doing a special "Europe edition" of Streaming Media, and I'm doing an article about webcasting for it. I've getting a bunch of questions about how to deliver low-latency live streaming to Silverlight, and so with their permission, I'm excerpting this section on that topic.

EDIT: A correction was made; turning off Fast Cache in Windows Media Services does not have any effect on webcasting latency.

While by default, Windows Media can offer 15-20 second end-to-end delay, it's possible to drive it down to 2-3 seconds with best practices on a good network, and we're looking at what we can do to push it to below even that. The critical thing is to tune the encoder, server, and player latency together.

There's an older but more detailed "Reducing Broadcast Delay" document on this topic over at the Windows Media portal that may be worth perusing.

Low Latency Webcasting

Latency is the measure of how much time goes between when video enters the encoder and leave the user display. Latency is something that doesn’t matter at all in some markets, and matters a lot in others.

The reason we have latency is buffering, and the reason we have buffering is for quality and reliability. By having the server wait several seconds after a video stream is received before sending it out, it’s able to support more peaks and valleys in the data rate, and makes it possible for a dropped packet to be detected and resent before its needed. In the same way, buffering in the player lets it average out data rates and recover dropped packets as well.

Large buffers were extremely important in the modem era, and are still useful in many kinds of networks today. The defaults are good for delivering high quality content over a variety of networks. But when minimizing the latency is important, and reliable networks are available, the end to end delay can be reduced substantially.

Since total end-to-end latency is the sum of the encoder latency, server latency, and player latency, plus how long it takes the packets to travel between each of those, improving latency requires tweaks to the encoder, server, and player in parallel.

Encoder

On the encoder side, reducing buffer size reduces startup latency. WME and Expression Encoder both enable you to go down to one second.. Using Lookahead or Lookahead Rate Control will increase latency beyond the buffer value (typically about another half a second for LRC).

For audio, Windows Media includes the “WMA Low Delay” audio codecs from 192-64 Kbps which provide lower latency than the normal WMA modes. If you’re targeting Silverlight 1.0 or WMP 10 or earlier, you’ll want to use that for low latency. If you can require WMP 11 or Silverlight 2, you can use the lower delay yet WMA 10 Pro codec at 32-96 Kbps.

Server

WMS features like Advanced Fast Start can dramatically reduce latency for on-demand content, but don’t apply to live webcasting as the server has to wait for content to arrive from the encoder it in real time, and so can only play out at real time.

Server buffering can be turned off entirely in WMS for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, yielding a significant drop in latency.

EDIT:

The previous version of this post suggested that turning off Fast Cache would help webcasting latency. On further research, this turns out not to be the case. Disabling Fast Cache will slow down on-demand startup time, but will have no effect one way or the other for live content.

Player

Normally the player isn’t under control of the streamer. By default WMP dynamically picks an optimum buffer size based on its measurements of network and stream performance. However, it’s possible to lower the buffer size in the player’s options. This can help reduce latency when watching streams with a good connection, but could produce pauses in the video when watching video from the general Internet.

Silverlight makes the player buffer size a controllable parameter, so an optimal setting can be applied for the content, and even adjusted on the fly. This is controlled by the BufferingTime parameter in a Silverlight MediaElement.

Expanded Wikipedia Results in Live Search

sarahintampa — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:23:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just announced a change to the search results that will now show more of a Wikipedia entry than before. This is a great new feature since many times when you’re doing a search, you just need a quick answer and Wikipedia is usually the link you click to read the info you need. So now in the Live Search results, there’s a good portion of the first paragraph available from the Wikipedia article under the link to Wikipedia. Do you love it or hate it? Let the team know. Personally, I’ve found it useful enough to make Live Search my Wikipedia search engine of choice.

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.

Latest Updates to SkyDrive are Live

Larry — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:52:00 GMT

The Windows Live SkyDrive team blog gives us the latest on new updates to SkyDrive that launched today. SkyDrive is now available in 24 additional locations, with support for a total of 62 countries. You can now leave comments on any SkyDrive file. You can add captions to photos, there is a click control to quickly move through files in the folder, and the photo previews are larger.

Live Search Spring Update Walk Through

Nic — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

I'm joined by Chris Rayner from the Live Search team as we walk through some of the new features in the latest spring update to Live Search. We check out xRank, News Search, Products, Live Search Health, HealthVault and Rick Astley... naturally.

Live Search is at www.live.com.

Live.com - Your FriendFeed Search Engine

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Being somewhat of a FriendFeed addict myself, this story on SEO and Tech Daily caught my eye: "Live.com Heavily Indexing FriendFeed." If you haven't already heard about FriendFeed (where have you been?), it's the hot new lifestreaming aggregation service that lets you keep tabs on all of your friends' activities on the social web. In one continuous stream of information, you can see when they post to their post, share a video on YouTube, add a picture to flickr, Digg a story, and much more from an ever-growing list of services. What's great about FriendFeed is that all your friends don't have to be on the service for you to enjoy using it - you have the ability to create "imaginary" friends if you know your friend's username on the service(s) you want to follow.

So, back to the blog post. What blogger Charlie Anzman noticed was that an ego-search (when you search for yourself on a search engine) on Live.com returned FriendFeed results for both the #1 and #2 spots. No one else seems to be doing that yet. I think this is great since finding someone on FriendFeed will quickly get you to their social network profiles where you can find out more about them. Of course, if that person if well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or something more official, those results would get ranked higher, but FriendFeed still has a strong showing.

It looks like I'll be people searching on Live.com from now on!

Watch Madonna's Concert Live on MSN

sarahintampa — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:47:00 GMT

On April 30th, Madonna will be performing at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. But you don't have to buy a ticket or be in New York to see this show - it will be available for you to watch via a live stream on MSN at http://music.msn.com/Madonna. You can visit the site now and sign up for reminders about the concert so you will be sure not to miss it. Reminders can be added to your calendar (MSN Calendar, Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo! Calendar) or you can sign up for Windows Live Alerts, which will remind you via Windows Live Messenger, email, or mobile phone. You can also browse through and watch previous concerts on MSN which have featured artists like the Hives, Sheryl Crow, Amy Winehouse, and more.

My.Live.com is Live

sarahintampa — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You may have heard the news about the new personalized homepages at my.live.com. If you're like me, a Live.com user, then you probably heard via an email sent to your Live ID-associated email address. The new page is available now from the easy-to-remember URL: http://my.live.com. To use the new page, just click on the "Sign In" link on the top right and sign in with your Windows Live account info.

Once you're signed in, you can begin customizing by adding content like news, the weather, an email preview gadget, and much more. You can also add new pages that appear as tabs across the top and even share those pages with friends via the "share" button. You can search from the search bar at the top of the page, or, by clicking the "search only" link on the top right, you can quickly switch back to the main Live.com search page.

New Live Search Products

sarahintampa — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:39:00 GMT

The LiveSide blog has the scoop on the changes to Live Search Products, even featuring before and after shots of the site. As of now, you can use the left-side navigation to refine your searches by brands, categories, price, opinions, and more. And up at the top, you can easily sort the searches by best match, best user ratings, best expert ratings, or by price. You can access the new site from http://search.live.com/products.

Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D Keep Getting Better

Larry — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:18:00 GMT

The Live Maps / Virtual Earth team must have gotten the last shipment of Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel and are putting it to good use pumping out tons of great new features. Jump over to the Virtual Earth Blog for a full recap, or over to ars technica for a hands on look, or just go to http://maps.live.com to use it.

Some of the cool new features include improved 3D views with higher resolution textures, the ability to export to your GPS, the ability to make your own 3D models with 3DVIA (just right click where you want a building), street/other labels in birds eye view, and 1-click directions.

One of my favorite new features is the mash-up features, check out this view of Giants Stadium with a seating data overlay. Also check out this view of the Seattle Transit System.

Those alone make for a significant update, but there's much more. You can now share your custom map content with other people, you can browse to a location and subscribe to a geo-location via RSS, there are tour enhancements, high-def movie output, and direction/traffic enhancements. Great stuff!

Update: Max on Channel 8 has a video, check it out.

Xbox Live at CES 2008

Laura — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:18:00 GMT

Xbox Live Marketplace has always been the place to be for all your gaming needs, but it's about to get even better.
There are great games coming in 2008, Grand Theft Auto, Splinter Cell Conviction, Halo Wars, Resident Evil 5, and of course the fan favorite Burnout 3 (download the demo now), Xbox Live Marketplace is more than the service that connects you to your friends, it's the way to play the games before they ship.

Your Xbox will now be the destination for all things entertainment.

New SkyDrive Features

Larry — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:09:00 GMT

The Windows Live SkyDrive team just announced some new features, here is what is included:

· 1 GB of storage – Everyone now gets 1 GB of space.

· RSS feeds – You can subscribe to RSS feeds on public folders. You will receive a notification anytime someone changes the folder.

· Add a contact from the SkyDrive website – You no longer have to go to Hotmail or Messenger to add contacts to share with. You can now add contacts on the SkyDrive website.

· See who uploaded a file – On the page that tells you all the details about a file, you can now see who uploaded the file.

· Share with non Live IDs—In the past, only Live ID contacts would appear in your contact picker. Now, you can share with any e-mail address. The owner of the non Live ID e-mail address will receive an e-mail with instructions on how to access the shared folder.

There are also lots of little features and fixes, check out the SkyDrive Team Blog for more information.

Making the most out of Live Search

Laura — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:39:00 GMT

A search engine can be your best friend or your biggest frustration. There are many out there to choose from so it's also important to choose wisely. Windows Live Search has made some huge advancements recently that will really enhance your user experience- and that's going to make all the difference. Take a look and find out what's in your future for search.

Windows Live Hotmail is here!

Laura — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:32:00 GMT

This week we launched Windows Live Hotmail, a new Web-based e-mail platform and the follow-on to its successful MSN Hotmail service. The new e-mail service will not only look a lot more like Outlook, Microsoft's popular e-mail application, but it will integrate with it, too.

Windows Live Hotmail will bring a few changes to Hotmail. Most notably, the interface was designed after Outlook, and will include familiar Outlook features, like right-click and drag-and-drop capabilities, preview pane customization, and auto-complete addressing.

Check out this clip and see it in full action. Then....go get it!

Live on Windows - Halo 2 and UNO video

Nic — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:41:00 GMT

A portion of my presentation from GO3 last month is now up on Gametrailers.com

During my session at GO3 I showed about 8 minutes of screen footage of Live on Windows Vista logging into Halo 2 and playing some cross platform UNO. This was the first public showing of this particular footage so the guys from Gametrailers created a four and a half minute highlight reel for a quick glimpse at the Live on Windows Vista experience for those that couldn't make it to GO3.

Check out the video here.