Entries tagged with wma - Channel 10

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.

Silverlight Media technologies overview in Expression newsletter

benwaggoner — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:47:00 GMT

In this month's Expression Newsletter, I've got an article giving an overvew of Media Technologies in Silverlight.

There's not much in there that hasn't been discussed elsewhere, but it's a nice one-stop overview of what's available in 1.0 and coming in 2.

Silverlight, Expression Encoder 1.0 released

benwaggoner — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:38:00 GMT

It's been a long road, but today was the big day for Silverlight to hit the world. Scott Guthrie's Blog has got the best detailed summary of the ton of stuff that got announced today. There are four big things relevant to digital media I want to highlight before I hop on the plane for IBC. I'll be focusing on Silverlight and its scenarios on the blog for the rest of this month.

All drop by the Microsoft booth at IBC if you'd like to say hello and see some demos of both our new codec technologies and Silverlight.

Silverlight 1.0 is out!

The next generation web plugin for digital media is now a released 1.0, so non-early adopters can start installing it and content creators and developers can start authoring to it. Silverlight uses Windows Media for its digital media, so a huge library of compatible content is immediately available. And the current CDN ecosystem for hosting and streaming all works, using Windows Media Services as shipping. Silverlight contains its own implementation of the codecs inside itself, and so doesn't have any dependency on WMP or other OS features, so you'll get an identical experience wherever Silverlight is installed. The set of codecs supported in 1.0 are:

Windows Media Video 7
Windows Media Video 8
Windows Media Video 9
Windows Media Video 10 (progressive only)
Windows Media Audio "Standard" (tested with WMA 9.2 back to WMA 7 files, but the bitstream has been locked-down since WMA 2)
MP3 (in a .mp3 file)

Full details on media features are here.

Silverlight includes robust auto-update features, so support for additional codecs is certainly possible in the future. We'd appreciate any feedback on missing codecs and media features that are keeping anyone from adopting Silverlight today.

Expression Encoder 1.0 is out!

Expression Encoder (formerly Expression Media Encoder) is a new compression tool targeting Silverlight, (although its WMV files will play in all the standard players). Beyond being a great WMV encoder, its real killer feature is easy generation of a Silverlight player experience around the media asset, including subtitles/captioning, thumbnail-based visual navigation, etcetera. It's a deep product, and I'm going to be doing a much more in-depth analysis of it here soon.

One important thing to note about Expression Encoder is that it can be used to build the Silverlight player experience around an already encoded WMV file, so it can be used in conjunction with other compression tools.

Expression Encoder is based on the Windows Media Format SDK 11, so all the registry key tweaks I've been discussing on this blog work perfectly with it.

Silverlight for Linux is announced!

Good details on Miguel de Icaza's web log. In essence, we're partnering with Novell on their Moonlight implementation of Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 (only 1.1 had been announced before). They'll be providing everything but the media codecs, which will be built by my team and provided via Microsoft.

So, Silverlight today has great reach for Windows and Mac (Intel and PowerPC), with Linux on the way.

Lots of content support!

For any new platform, the chicken-and-egg question is always paramount when discussing adoption - why should users install before there's content, and why should content publishers target it before users have installed it? That we're already compatible with a huge volume of WMV content is a big help here, of course. But nothing beats high-profile content companies targeting the format to get the installs out there (which is also a great validation of the unique value Silverlight provides).

Customers already deploying content include: MLB.com (Major League Baseball), Home Shopping Network, World Wrestling Entertainment, and the "Entertainment Tonight" show.

Silverlight is also now deployed on several Microsoft sites, including the Halo 3 preview site, including the HD version - I worked on the encoding workflow for these assets), Tafiti.com, MSN Extra, and MSN Podium '08. Silverlight will also be used in many other new and updated Microsoft properties.