Entries tagged with compression - Channel 10

Netflix’s Neil Hunt shares encoding workflow info

benwaggoner — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:50:00 GMT

Now, this is a blog post! Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix, has just put up a great blog post talking about their encoding workflow for their video streaming services.

It’s full of awesomeness, but I wanted to excerpt the section describing their 1st gen, 2nd gen, and HD encoding settings and workflow.

First Generation Encoding

Our first set of encodes are based on WMV3 and WMA in ASF with WMDRM10 (Janus). We chose these standards because the Janus components have been widely adopted by our CE partners such as Roku, LG Electronics, Samsung, TiVo, and of course Microsoft Xbox.
We encode most content at 500, 1000, 1600, and 2200kbps VBR, but some titles whose source quality merits it have also been encoded at 3400kbps. The highest bitrate encodes are fit into 720x480 non-square pixels (the usual 1.2 PAR for widescreen content, 0.9 PAR for 4:3), but optimum encoding at lower bitrates is achieved with fewer pixels. Encoded films are normally at 24fps to match the source, while shot-to-video and mixed material is de-interlaced to 30fps (or 25fps for PAL content).

Netflix has been using anamorphic video all along, which I think is an underused feature of Windows Media and other formats. When you’re limited to 720x480 pixels, you want to encode all the pixels you’ve got, without having to synthesize any extra.

Second Generation Encoding

The new Silverlight player (that some users are helping us test as I write) uses VC1 Advanced Profile encoding with PlayReady DRM. A key property is that each GOP header includes frame size and resolution, which allows us to assemble a stream on the fly from different bitrate encodes as your broadband bandwidth fluctuates. (Another key feature is more coverage, including Intel Macs and Firefox users.) We expect to switch completely to the new player later this year.
The VC1 encoders are more efficient than the WMV3 encoders, so we are currently encoding VC1AP at slightly lower birates: 375, 500, 1000, and 1500kbps, all square pixel. At some point we are likely to add a couple more resolutions of non-square pixel encodes capturing the original pixel-aspect-ratio of the source.
We are also re-wrapping the VC1AP encodes in WMDRM10 for CE devices, which will gradually switch to the more efficient encodes in future firmware upgrades.

This is a great example of the improved efficiency of the VC-1 Encoder SDK and tools based on it. Not all Windows Media/VC-1 encoding is equal; the latest tools can offer a very meaningful reduction in bitrate required for a give quality level, improving user experiences and the cost of delivering the content.

The new encodes are backwards compatible to older hardware and software encoders, so even older devices can take advantage of the improvements.

High Definition Encodes

Today we have rights to deliver about 400 streams in HD (720p). More titles will be added over time. We experimented with first-generation WMV3 encodes at 4000kbps and 5500kbps, but settled on second-generation HD encodes with VC1AP at 2600kbps and 3800kbps, which extends their accessibility down to lower home broadband connections. As with SD, encodes of film material are at 24fps, and encodes of shot-to-video material are at 30fps (or 25fps for PAL), rather than the 60fps that would come from a Blu-ray disc - we judged the 60fps content as too expensive of bandwidth for now. In general, these encodes are definitively better than SD, but won't challenge well-executed Blu-ray encodes - that would require a bitrate out of reach for most domestic broadband today. We believe Moore's law will drive home broadband higher and higher enabling full 1080p60 encodes in a few years.

There’s codecs for you – a good 720p experience at 3800 Kbps, which is probably a little below the average 480p bitrate used for MPEG-2 on the DVDs that fly around the nation in those Netflix envelopes.

I’m not that worried about 1080p60 encoding myself. The vast majority of fictional content is shot 24p, including 99% at least of Blu-ray discs. While Blu-ray players may output 60p, the encodes, and hence bitrate requirements, are still 1080p. I find that typical film content in VC-1 wants around 6-8 Mbps for a 1080p24 experience enough better than 720p to be worth the trouble.

I just got my Xbox set up to handle the Netflix streams – now I’ve got to go check out some of those 400 HD titles! Hmm. Pan’s Labyrinth and Heroes.

Anyway, it’s great stuff. I love it when partners can share this kind of detail about what they’re doing.

Silverlight 2 powering Netflix on Mac

benwaggoner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:38:00 GMT

It's been discussed for a while, but the time is now - Netflix has just announced Silverlight 2 will power their streaming video service, which had been Windows-only until now. Silverlight 2 adds support for PlayReady DRM, so we now have the same DRM support on Mac and Windows. The service will be available on Xbox 360 as well.

You have to be a Netflix subscriber of course, but the content is commercial-free and much higher quality than the various free video services. They encode up to a full 720x480, in proper 4:3 or 16:9, at a range of bitrates. The higher rates definitely outperform standard def cable and satellite in video quality.

Lots of good stuff in the press release, but I had a couple of things I wanted to call out (bolding mine).

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced it has begun the deployment of Microsoft Silverlight to enhance the instant watching component of the Netflix service and to allow subscribers for the first time to watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. The deployment, which will initially touch a small percentage of new Netflix subscribers, is the first step in an anticipated roll-out of the new platform to all Netflix subscribers by the end of the year.

Note that this won’t be immediately available to all customers.

Silverlight is designed for delivery of cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences inside a Web browser. It is expected that Netflix members who watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their computers will enjoy a faster, easier connection and a more robust viewing experience with Silverlight, due to the quality built directly into the player. Among the viewing enhancements with the new player is a breakthrough in timeline navigation that vastly improves the use of fast-forwarding and rewinding. The new Netflix player takes advantage of PlayReady DRM, which is built into Silverlight, for the playback of protected content on both Windows-based PCs and on Macs. That had not been possible with previous generation technologies.

This is one of the first big rollouts of PlayReady with Silverlight in the USA. When you see the new navigation, it’s a real testament to the difference between a media player plugin like the WMP OCX, and a rich application runtime that plays media well like Silverlight.

The rich user experience support and DRM, what else does Silverlight bring to the equation? One big thing is that PlayReady DRM supports http delivery of pre-encrypted content, unlike other platforms that require a proprietary streaming server and protocol be used to deliver protected content, applying DRM on the fly. Pre-encrypted content is both more scalable (since the encryption processing is only done once, not per user), and more secure (since an in-the-clear media file doesn’t need to be transmitted and stored on the server).

There’s been two big technical challenges in web video for the last dozen years or so.

How do we deliver the best experience to each user, in a world of variable bandwidth and hardware power
How do we deliver that experience as cost effectively as possible, enabling new business models in video distribution.

We’re at the point now where a user with a fast connection and a decent computer should have a darn good video and audio experience. Netflix is a testament to what’s possible as the cost to deliver a MB of video gets low enough, from a business perspective. While finally delivering a user experience better than VideoCD.

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

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.

Technical Emmy for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

benwaggoner — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:05:00 GMT

I have many ways of reminding my wife I'm an hopeless video nerd. Among them is that I only pay attention to the Emmy Awards she's watching when the recap of the technical awards comes on.

So, I was really excited that our own Dr. Gary Sullivan, chairman of the Joint Video Team, was on hand last week to receive a 2008 Primetime Emmy^® Engineering Award for developing H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile. In the words of the Academy:

Joint Video Team Standards Committee (JVT) for the development of the High Profile for H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC. The High Profile enables high definition images in the H.264 video coding system used today to deliver HD video over satellite and cable TV as well as Blu-ray Disc. The JVT is a standardization team comprised of members from the International Standardization Organization (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The award recognized Broadcom, NTT DoCoMo, Dolby Laboratories, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Microsoft, Motorola, Panasonic, Sony, and Thomson as contributing companies, as well as standards organizations ISO, IEC, and ITU.

Gary has long represented Microsoft as as chair and co-chair of the Joint Video Team that coordinated the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC effort between ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG, amongst his many other efforts like DXVA; his page on Wikipedia has more details.

I suppose some people might be surprised at Microsoft's inclusion here, but they shouldn't be. While Microsoft has a long heritage of making our own ground-up codecs like VC-1, we've also long been involved in standards-based codecs, including the original MPEG-4 Part 2 as well as MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264. And we've got a number of products that incorporate H.264 today, including Mediaroom, the Zune 4/8 and 80, and Xbox 360. H.264 are and VC-1 are both great codecs, with somewhat different sweet spots, and we use either or both as appropriate in our products, platforms, and services.

The picture above has, left to right: Malcolm Johnson (director of the ITU standardization bureau), Ajay Luthra (JVT vice-chair from Motorola), Gary Sullivan (JVT chair from Microsoft), Thomas Wiegand (JVT vice-chair from Fraunhofer HHI), and Scott Jameson (chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1)

ANSI

EE Times

Dolby

Minoru "Mick" Etoh's blog (who represented DoCoMo at the ceremony)

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...

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.

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.

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.

Expression Encoder SDK is out!

benwaggoner — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:01:00 GMT

One of the neat features of Expression Encoder 2 we've been talking about is its .NET object model interface for automation. I'm happy to report that it's now available for download!

Here it is

Sample projects

It includes a number of sample projects (quoting from the help file). These are a good jumping off point for various scenarios.

Simple encode

The simple encode sample is a console application that demonstrates how to encode a file from a console application when showing progress. To use it, just run the built application (Simple.exe) at a command prompt.

Asynchronous encoding

The WPFEncode application demonstrates how to encode a file from a UI application when displaying the progress of the encoding process. To use the application, click the Browse button to point to a file that you want to encode and then click the Encode button to encode it. When the file is encoding, a bar displays the encoding progress.

When you press the Encode button, the application creates a thread to perform the encode to make sure that the UI thread is not blocked. The progress events are called from a non-UI thread. Consequently, we use the Windows Presentation Foundation Dispatcher to marshal the updates to the UI thread.

If you try to close the application when the encoding is still occurring, the application prompts you to confirm that you want to stop the process. If you confirm, the application stops the encoding thread but delays closing the application until the thread actually stops.

MediaInfo

The MediaInfo sample is a console application that demonstrates how you can use the MediaItem class to extract media and metadata information from a media file. To use it, just run the built application (MediaInfo.exe) at a command prompt with the full path of a media file as the parameter, as shown in the following example:

Publishing plug-in

Publishing plug-ins enables you to take video and Microsoft Silverlight template assets that you have created as part of an encoding job and then do something with encoded assets. For example, you can upload the media asset by using FTP, WEBDAV, or METAWEBLOG API, publishing the asset to an asset management system or web service, or creating a data CD.

The following code sample demonstrates how to use a publishing plug-in to add the output of an encode job to a Zip file by using the Open Packaging Convention components found in Microsoft .NET 3.0.

A publishing plug-in is required to derive from the PublishPlugin class, which in turn derives from the EncoderPlugin class:

Template plug-in

The template plug-in lets you customize template settings and interact with the job through the IPluginHost interface. The plug-in also lets you add or remove files from the template output when the template is published.

The following code sample demonstrates how to add the default template parameter control to Microsoft Expression Encoder with only several lines of XAML. It also implements a custom script command creation feature that shows how the template plug-in can interact with the current job by adding a script command at the current play head position of the selected MediaItem.

Within Expression Encoder, every template receives a template plug-in. If the template doesn’t specify one, a default one will be assigned. A template plug-in derives from the TemplatePlugin class, which in turn derives from the EncoderPlugin class.

Videos from the "Secret Compressionist's Ball"

benwaggoner — Thu, 29 May 2008 03:39:00 GMT

I've always called my annual compressionists party something like the "Ben Waggoner Compressionist's Party" but David Sayed from the Expression Encoder team suggests the much better name of the "Secret Compressionist's Ball"

Better yet, he's got a couple of video interviews from the party! You'll see me in the background in my mildly famous purple shirt in a few shots.

First, Tony Houghton from Promoscape, talking about Silverlight.

Second, Bruce Lidl from MainConcept talking about their VC-1 codec implementation they're now licensing out, including support on Mac and Linux.

The clips are embedded at smaller than they're encoded; double-click to see them in their full glory.

Ben at Streaming Media East

benwaggoner — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:37:00 GMT

I'm at Streaming Media East this week in New York.

On Monday I'm doing a three-hour workshop on "Deploying On-Demand and Live Media Experiences with Microsoft Silverlight."

My handouts are available here.

I'll also be at the Microsoft booth on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday:
10 am - 12 pm
2 pm - 6 pm

Wednesday:
10 am - 12 pm
2 pm - 4 pm

Expression Suite 2 and Expression Encoder 2 now shipping!

benwaggoner — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:43:00 GMT

May 1st is a happy day for me! I went over to www.microsoft.com/expression, and was delighted to find that the Expression Studio 2 is now shipping, including the final version of Expression Encoder 2. There's a 30-day trial available for download. Boxed copies of Studio are available today at CompUSA and Office Max, with other retailers coming. There will also be the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription for $999/year (academic and volume pricing coming soon), which includes Expression Studio along with Visual Studio, Office, Visio, XP, Vista, Virtual PC, and Parallels Desktop (to run all of the above on Mac).

As I've said before, I feel that Expression Encoder 2 is the best compression tool at fulfilling the needs of its market since Terran Interactive's Media Cleaner Pro 3.1 (so long ago I can't even find anything on the web about it!). Here are some of my favorite things about it from my obsessive compression nerd's perspective.

First desktop priced VC-1 Encoder SDK based product ($199).
And the VC-1 implementation gives you great quality by default, and gives you an advanced mode that accesses the useful features, while handling the more esoteric ones behind the scenes. For example, the rule for WMV PowerToy was use Static Motion Vector Cost if using P-frame DQuant, otherwise use Dynamic. So Expression Encoder 2 just has a DQuant setting, and uses the right Motion Vector Cost based on that.
High quality scaling and deinterlacing modes
WMA Pro support, targeting Silverlight 2's support for that. So danceable music at 48 Kbps.
"Smart by default" - you can use the same preset and feed it a PAL 16:9 interlaced file and a NTSC 4:3 progressive file, and it'll do the right thing without having to do a single click: you'd get a 640x360 deinterlaced 25p file and a 640x480 29.97 file.
Which means you don't have a huge combination of settings to deal with all the video formats. Instead, the presets are scenario based; you just need one "1 Mbps streaming" option that'll handle all the video file variants.
Great multi-clip templates, so you can make a video gallery, with each clip having its own optional thumbnail-based chapter navigation (hmm, that deserves a nice demo).
Easy creation of thumbnail-based chapter navigation!
Captioning and metadata support, including ISAN.
Available soon, an integrated publishing module to go straight to Silverlight Streaming.
Support for a wide variety of source formats, including QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media, VOB (DVD), many other flavors of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and AVISynth.
Automation available via both command-line and a .NET object model.
Simple editing features, like in/out points, preroll/postroll videos, and image and animated overlays.
GPU acceleration for previews
A great A/B compare feature, enabling short sections of the file to be encoded with a variety of compression settings, and then compared (playing in real time! zoomed in!, with an A/B split screen slider!) to both the source and each other.
An unbelievably cool live encoding module, which supports multiple cameras with live switching, streaming from files, including looping, live metadata insertion, and big quality improvements from lookahead rate control and dynamic complexity. I owe you a blog post describing that as well.

So, in summary, I guess I'd say I like it.

I've had a some blog posts highlighting different projects done with Expression Encoder 2 which you can follow along with.

Hands on with high-touch encoding: Streaming Media All-Stars Redo

Encoding screen recordings for Silverlight in VC-1 with Expression Encoder 2

"What Happens in Vegas" - 720p Movie trailer at 2 Mbps via Silverlight Streaming

I've got other information about Expression Encoder and how it fits into Silverlight at

My NAB Presentations

Silverlight Media technologies overview in Expression newsletter

And, of course I'll be covering Expression Encoder 2 as one of the products we cover in my

My June 23-27th class at Stanford