David Sayed's Microsoft Blog

Innovative France 24 Silverlight Player (Updated)

dsayed — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Updated 10/14/2009: Player is now live on the front page of the France 24 website. Changed the link to the new player, which has removed some of the interactive features, no doubt to return later.

France 24, the French 24 hour news channel, has introduced a new Silverlight-based player that also uses Smooth Streaming to deliver an innovative take on live news. You can check out the player and their blog post (in French.)

Here’s the quick summary of the France 24 French blog post:

“Imagine that each spoken word in a video is automatically transcribed and associated with a recorded video sequence. Add to that a program grid, real-time viewer data and vote tallying. Then present all of this in a high definition player that enables you to control the playback and you get the latest prototype presented by France 24 and built in collaboration with the R&D teams at Yacast Media and Microsoft.”

What does this actually let you do? Well a number of really neat things:

Live SD broadcast content at up to 1.3Mbps using Smooth Streaming, so you get the best quality video to suit your bandwidth and CPU (Smooth Streaming isn’t just for HD).
The player timeline is the program grid. Instead of blindly guessing a particular program might start, you actually see the program listings under the timeline. Clicking on the back or forward arrows move the timeline by an hour.
Tags (metadata) of keywords are automatically extracted from the program audio. The tags are shown as a pop-up over the timeline and provide another navigation option.
~~A real-time graph showing the volume of viewers of the stream.~~
~~A real-time bubble chart showing voting – the votes represent users who recommend a particular portion of the program.~~

Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards

dsayed — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:58:41 GMT

We’ve been nominated in three categories for the 2009 Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards. There are 22 categories in all and run the gamut from content to technologies. You can enter your votes here. We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

Voting closes on October 16th and the winners will be announced at Streaming Media West in San Jose on November 18th, so if you feel inclined to vote please do so soon.

Obviously, I’m not asking you to vote specifically for us, but if you don’t know about the awards then you can’t vote so I thought I’d at least let everyone know and hope for the best :)

Roll Up! Roll Up! Get Your Smooth Streaming Here!

dsayed — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:48:57 GMT

Want to know more about Smooth Streaming in the real world? Join us on Thursday October 15th at 11am Pacific time for a special live web broadcast hosted by Streaming Media Magazine.

Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media Magazine will moderate the discussion between our very own Chris Knowlton who is a senior program manager in the IIS team at Microsoft, and Jaime Miles who is the head of European Architecture and Engineering for Level 3 Communications in Europe.

The webcast will cover how to deliver HD quality web video over HTTP. Chris will talk about the technology and benefits of Smooth Streaming, and Jaime will give real-world examples of how Level 3 have implemented the technology for recent high-profile live events such as Roland Garros and the UEFA Super Cup.

Head over to StreamingMedia.com to sign-up!

70th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz

dsayed — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:02:29 GMT

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, Netflix is doing two very special events:

A live “Songs from Oz” concert in Central Park featuring songs from the movie. The concert is being streamed on-demand using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.
A special free presentation of the remastered movie itself on Sunday October 3rd for Netflix subscribers and non-subscribers alike, also streamed using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.

The events have been made possible through the combination of Netflix, Microsoft, iStreamPlanet and Limelight.

You can find out more about the event by visiting the Netflix Wizard of Oz site.

Canal+ Launches FOOT+ Soccer Channel in Silverlight

dsayed — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:37:47 GMT

Groupe CANAL, the premiere pay television channel in France with 10.6 million subscribers, is adopting Microsoft Silverlight for their FOOT+ online streaming video service. devoted to covering French and European soccer. FOOT+, which is an additional subscription service to Canal+ customers, provides live and on-demand access to French and European soccer including the French Ligue 1, UEFA Champions League and the Europa League. More information can be found here and in the French press release (PDF).

Tech-Ed Japan Smooth Streamed

dsayed — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:06:06 GMT

Tech-Ed Japan 2009 has embraced Smooth Streaming. You can watch the keynote (in Japanese) for a few more days here. Enjoy!

A Small Production System - Disk Performance

dsayed — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:54:21 GMT

Uncompressed (or lightly compressed) video needs lots of disk space. More than that, if you’re capturing live video, that disk capacity needs to be fast.

I’m using a Blackmagic Intensity Pro video capture card. It will capture 1080p uncompressed if your system can support that. It comes with a handy Disk Speed Test that measures read/write performance and translates that into frames per second of video at different formats.

In the original build of my video production box described in my previous post, I configured the two Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 HDE721010SLA330 1TB drives as a hardware RAID 0 array with a 128K strip size connected to the onboard Intel ICH10R controller. Here’s what Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test gave me:

This is a stark contrast to running with older drives in the same configuration. Write speeds enabling 122fps for 8-bit 4:2:2 720p video should be more than enough for good captures. Running the DiskMark test that is part of PassMark Software’s PerformanceTest 7.0 indicated a sequential read rate of 222MB/s and a sequential write rate of 186MB/s.

For grins, I added another two 1TB drives to create a 4-way RAID 0 array with a whopping 3726GB capacity. The two new drives were a pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS, which have the same 32MB buffer as the Hitachi Deskstars. Running Speed Test again gave me:

So in this configuration, it looks like I might be within spitting distance of being able to do 8-bit 4:2:2 1080p captures (even though the disk write frame rate measured 72fps, Blackmagic recommend a healthy margin and also SATA drives get slower the fuller they are). DiskMark indicated a sequential read rate of 341MB/s and a sequential write rate of 304MB/s.

I suspect that the only way I’m going to improve on this performance is to use a hardware RAID card with an on-board processor and dedicated memory.

Here’s the summary then:

	2-way RAID 0	4-way RAID 0
8-bit YUV 4:2:2 1080p	54fps	72fps
8-bit YUV 4:2:2 720p	122fps	163fps
Sequential Read	222MB/s	341MB/s
Sequential Write	186MB/s	304MB/s

A Small Production System - Current Status

dsayed — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:54:21 GMT

We're doing more and more video work in my team, the latest being some of the videos used for our Expression 3/Silverlight 3 launch in San Francisco last week. You'll be able to see some of these on www.seethelight.com soon.

Because one of the standout features of Silverlight 3 is Smooth Streaming, our adaptive streaming technology, I want to do what I can to ensure that video content we produce is of high-quality.

Since most of our cameras are HD capable, shooting in HD is expected even if it isn't always warranted - just because it is HD doesn't mean it is going to look great - but we do what is expected, so HD it is. Sometimes, this has useful side effects. For example, the SF launch was professionally recorded and "live compositing" was performed on-site targeting 720p. The additional horizontal real estate on the screen, enabled us to have a nice large window for the slides or demo, and a decent size window of the camera feed (see below). We wouldn't have been able to do that in a 4:3 frame size. Now in this instance, the camera feed wasn't actually SD, but the output was recorded in an HD format.

But that's material for another time. This blog post is about putting together a meaty enough system for doing live capture and editing.

For a while, I've been using a combination of a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 RC or Mac OS 10.5 depending on the situation, and a quad-core AMD machine. I wanted to have hardware capture capability in order to both capture uncompressed video sources for testing and also to capture computer generated video at full frame rates. This type of capturing eats up disk space like nothing else. I also need to deal with the material once it has been captured - both editing and compression. So I'm gradually building up something that will meet these needs. Before launch, I was working with a "Frankenrig" PC that I cobbled together out of parts. The most significant additions proved to be an external 2TB drive setup as RAID 0 and an Intel Q9550 quad-core processor. The 2TB drive is a bargain basement SimpleTech from Fry's (which cost the princely sum of $199 if you can believe that), yet it has USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and most importantly eSATA.

The video capture card is a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which features an HDMI input, an HDMI output and an impressive D connector pigtail of analogue connections for audio and video. Its more expensive siblings, the Decklink series, feature SDI, which seemed to be overkill for my needs. Now I've had success with the Blackmagic cards before for video capture, but audio has always been problematic being plagued with sync issues. The jury is still out, but my hope is that with a more capable system that I outline below, I'll be setup for success.

I wanted a compact case that could be transported (and shipped) easily. At the same time, I wanted something that would have enough internal bays for a system drive and two drives for an internal RAID 0 array. Why the preoccupation with RAID 0? I need the speed, or rather HD video does. I settled on an Apevia X-Qpack2, which is for a Micro ATX motherboard and features a 500W power supply, two hard drive bays, one 3.5" external bay and two 5.25" external bays. This accommodates my storage requirements well.

I have had good experience with Intel motherboards, and I chose a DG45ID, which is a recent board based on the G45 chipset and includes on-board video. This seems to be a popular board amongst HTPC builders since it features both HDMI and DVI outputs. I paired the board with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Q9550 quad-core CPU running at 2.83GHz.

I re-used a 300GB SATA drive for the system (I like to keep the system and ideally the apps on separate physical drives, and the data on an array) and a couple of old 160GB SATA drives for the RAID 0 array for testing. I hooked up everything to the motherboard and set the RAID option in the BIOS and started installing Windows 7 RC. Here's a nice twist: I did this from a USB flash drive, which makes the installation process much quicker than from optical media or the network. Instructions for how to take an ISO and put it onto the USB flash drive can be found in many places, but I used the procedure outline here. Yet again, Windows 7 blew me away with recognising pretty much everything on the board and downloading updated chipset drivers from Windows Update. Great stuff! The only thing it didn't find was a PCI Simple Communications Controller, which was banged in Device Manager. There may be other solutions, but I downloaded the Intel Management Engine driver from Intel's site. The only trick is to run it in compatibility mode for Vista, otherwise it will fail claiming "wrong OS". I also had to download and install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, which let me see and configure the RAID array from within Windows. The last step was to download and install the Blackmagic Intensity Pro drivers.

Blackmagic ships a useful Speed Test utlity, which is installed with the driver. It will run without a Blackmagic card in the system, and is useful for determining whether your machine is fast enough to handle video capture. I also used Passmark's PerformanceTest to evaluate raw disk benchmarks. The initial results were not at all promising. The Blackmagic Speed Test was telling me that I could get a 63 frames per second capturing 720p video in 8-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed. If I went the compressed MJPEG route, I could get better results but they caution that there's overhead that isn't reflected in those results, so it didn't look good for capturing a 720p60 source. I got slightly better results with the eSATA 2TB drive, but nothing to write home about. The disk write performance was about 80MB/s.

As an experiment I took the external drive apart and used its two drives directly as internal drives in the computer. These were much more recent drives (Hitachi Deskstars with a 32MB buffer) and they basically doubled the performance, so that's looking good.

As another experiment, I used a Highpoint Technologies RocketRAID 2642 hardware RAID controller, which uses a Marvell 88SE6445 accelerator and seems to be well received. Unfortunately, I saw no noticeable difference - in fact performance was slightly worse. Using another (more expensive) controller like an Adaptec or a 3ware may yield better results, but I do not have the ability to test this at the moment. So the Highpoint went back to Fry's and I'll stick with the stock Intel chipset for now.

A couple of notes, which may be useful to others considering a build like this. First of all, if you even think you're going to go for a motherboard-based RAID implementation at some point, select RAID in the BIOS before installing the OS. It will make your life easier down the road. Second, while BIOS updates are generally a good thing, I found that having gone a fully setup RAID system with an initial release to the latest BIOS caused the system to become non-bootable and I had to reinstall everything. Finally, the Highpoint RocketRAID card was not happy with the on-board controller set to RAID, which meant another reinstall of the OS. Thankfully installing from the USB flash drive and not having anything on the computer made it relatively painless...

I'm going to put Windows 7 64-bit on the machine since everything seems to have a 64-bit driver and we'll see how everything looks when I start capturing video. Stay tuned...

hardware

RAI Smooth Streaming

dsayed — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:17:00 GMT

A nice demo of SD content using Smooth Streaming:

http://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/hd/raitvhd.html?v=1

DeepZoomPix Coolness

dsayed — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:26:51 GMT

MSN Brazil is using DeepZoomPix on their site show off pictures from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The DeepZoomPix photo exploration experience engages site visitors, which means they’ll spend longer on the site, which is boon to any site that uses advertising to support its pages. It is also novel enough that visitors are likely to share it with their friends, causing the experience to go viral. Check it out at http://events.br.msn.com/cannes-2009.aspx

CDNetworks Does Smooth Streaming

dsayed — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:39:00 GMT

CDNetworks, a Korea-based CDN has introduced support for Smooth Streaming and it looks great! You can check it out for yourself by visiting http://www.nextsmooth.com.

What’s particularly nice is the demo player shown above. You can see high-quality movie trailers, which have been encoded at seven different bitrates. In the screenshot above you can see how Smooth Streaming steps up the quality level (by selecting a higher bitrate stream) as network and CPU utilization conditions permit. A unique features of the CDNetworks Silverlight player is the “magnifying glass” that you can see above. You can move this around the video and inspect it more closely. You can even adjust the magnification! Finally, take a look at the timeline at the bottom; as you hover over it with your mouse, a still thumbnail of the video at that point (actually I-frame) is shown.

Great work guys – awesome demo app and fantastic use of the technology!

DeepZoomPix: a new way of experiencing photos

dsayed — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:44:00 GMT

Today, we unveiled an exciting technology demo called DeepZoomPix. It enables you to experience a rich way of interacting with large numbers of high resolution photos. The best part is that you can use your own photos either by direct upload, Facebook or Flickr link, or an image RSS feed.

The reason we built DeepZoomPix is to showcase a number of technologies and concepts:

Great User Experience	DeepZoomPix provides a different experience for navigating, viewing and exploring photos, which provides the kind of capabilities you wouldn’t normally expect in a web browser. We used Microsoft Silverlight to create this experience.
Design Technologies	Show designers what can be accomplished relatively simply using Silverlight.
Developer Technologies	Show developers the power of Silverlight and the Azure Services Platform.

I’ll blog some more about DeepZoomPix later but for now, why don’t you try it? Go to www.deepzoompix.com. You’ll need a Windows Live ID and Silverlight installed (you’ll be prompted if you don’t have it already installed).

CTV Streams HD Content with Silverlight

dsayed — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:07:00 GMT

CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, has some great high definition content on their HD Beta site. Using Microsoft’s new Smooth Streaming technology, CTV is using Silverlight and Akamai’s CDN to stream high quality content with no stuttering.

Not all of the content is geo-locked. You can check out both Corner Gas and Malawi’s Song from outside Canada.

Broadcast News

dsayed — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:27:00 GMT

Colleagues in the field highlighted a couple of nice broadcast news sites outside the United States using Silverlight. Even better, they aren’t geo-locked so you can have a play with them no matter where you are. And even better if you are French or Italian speaking – they are in your language!

France Télévisions Infos

Video on demand TV news stories from across France. Bitrate is 300kbps.

I’ve highlighted some of the nice features enabled by the custom Silverlight player. Of course, there are the playback controls, but there’s also content rating and the ability to add the content to your playlist or send a link via email. The program guide appears overlaid above the video at the top of the screen. Other clips are shown overlaid at the bottom of the screen. These overlays disappear when you want them to.

Try it out for yourself here.

RAI

RAI in Italy has a large site with some content that is not geo-locked. Go here to see the video wall.

Some of the video on demand content is viewable outside Italy (like Telepredicatori). Below you can see the embedded player with playback controls.

The live 24 hour news channel is available outside Italy. Look for Diretta RAINews24.

Some of the unique features are the remote control in full screen mode, that gives the viewer a TV-like viewing experience.

Other non geo-locked assets on the RAI site are some of their virtual channels. These are not live, but they are group similar content together. Look for Primo Piano, Rai Kids, Rai Tween, Sanremo, Rai Music, Fiction, Comici, Millepagine, Science & Technology and Viaggi e Paesi.

How to Force Expression Encoder 2 Express Mode

dsayed — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:39:00 GMT

Expression Encoder Express is a free version of Expression Encoder. If you have the full version and want to force Express mode (for testing purposes perhaps), there are two ways to do so:

Registry Key Method

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Expression\Encoder\2.0]

"ExpressVersion"=dword:00000001

Object Model Method

Mode.IsExpress=true