The Expression Encoder 4 player templates have had the following major updates since Expression Encoder 3

• Converted to Silverlight 4
• Replaced use of Expression Encoder Smooth Streaming Media Stream Source with the IIS Client Team's "SmoothStreamingMediaElement" - AKA the "SSME" The SSME implementation is what was used for NBC's 2010 Olympics player and for the Sunday night football player. The SSME based implementation adds support for the updated Smooth Streaming format, including support for ISMT text streams.
• Added support for "Live Smooth Streaming" - both from Expression Encoder 4 and from various hardware encoding solutions.
• Added support for "TimedTextLibrary" captioning - which supports formatted text and multi-line captions.
• Added support for multiple caption languages.
• A new "CPU Heuristic" that improves the Smooth Streaming playback experience when HD content - particularly 1080P content is played on machines that can't actually handle rendering 1080P content. The prior generation "dropped frame" heuristics work in a "responsive" manner that results in the player selecting bitrates that are higher than the client's machine can smoothly render and then falling back to a lower bitrate. The "CPU heuristic" is "predictive" and estimates how well the client machine will render higher bitrates and doesn't attempt rendering bitrates predicted to fail. The end result is smoother playback experience on a wider range of machines.
• A more detailed "Smooth Streaming" performance graph in the "graphing" players (The "Silverlight Default" and "Graphing" players) - The new graph contains the following data:
  • EE3 supported graph data
    • Red line - currently rendered bitrate.
    • Blue line - currently downloading bitrate
    • Green line - rendered frame rate.
  • New EE4 supported graph data
    • Cyan line - dropped frame rate.
    • Yellow line - measured CPU processor load
    • Straight yellow line - CPU processor load limit - if CPU load exceeds this - The "CPU Heuristic" will lower Smooth Streaming bitrate available for download
    • Light green line - estimated CPU processor load at next higher bitrate.
    • Straight light green line - estimated CPU processor load "UP" threshold - if the "estimated CPU processor load at next higher bitrate" line is below this value the "CPU heuristic" will attempt to play the next higher bitrate.
    • Fat purple line - The highest bitrate that the "CPU heuristic" will make available for download.
      
• Added support for correctly rendering video with non-square pixels (Silverlight 3 and 4 don't have direct support for non-square pixels)
• Reorganization of "common" player code - In user customized EE3 player templates each player "skin" had redundant copies of "common" player code (MediaPlayer.DLL, etc) This made it more labor intensive to have multiple player "skins" with customized player logic. The new organization allows all customized EE4 player "skins" to share the common code.

This information is provided "AS IS" with no warrantee and confers no rights.