David Sayed's Microsoft Blog : video

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).

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

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!

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

How Netflix does encoding

dsayed — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:07:33 GMT

Ever wondered how Netflix encodes their video material for their streaming service? This blog post from their chief product office, Neil Hunt, goes into some considerable detail.

Netflix Brings "Watch Instantly" to Mac Users with Silverlight

dsayed — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:23:00 GMT

I love Netflix and I love their Watch Instantly feature, which enabled me to discover and catch up with Heroes, re(discover) classics and watch some admittedly dubious films that I would have never otherwise bothered with. Mostly, I use the feature on my Windows Media Center Edition PC that is plugged into my plasma at home. Netflix' Windows client uses Windows Media DRM to secure their content, but left Mac users out in the cold.

Now, Netflix has a public beta of their Silverlight 2-based player, which works great in both Safari and Firefox on my MacBook Pro (currently running MacOS 10.5.5) It works in Windows too of course, and once you opt-in to the public beta you opt-in to the Silverlight experience for both platforms.

Below are some screen captures for your enjoyment. Video quality is on par with the Windows version, though I've not tried plugging the Mac into the plasma for the full screen experience yet.

What is particularly useful is the scrubbing view, which is activated when you click and drag the playhead across the timeline. You get the current play position in the centre of the screen and smaller thumbnails of neighbouring frames to its left and right. The longer the material, the more frames you see (TV shows tend to show one frame on each side of the current position, movies tend to show two frames on each side).

Close up of scrubbing view

Normal playback view (click to enlarge)

Scrubbing view (click to enlarge)

Loading stage (click to enlarge)

Video quality check (click to enlarge)

Acquiring DRM license (click to enlarge)

Photokina Day 1

dsayed — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:19:13 GMT

Yesterday was the first day of Photokina. I spent much of the day on the Microsoft stand talking to people about Expression Media. I did get a chance to walk around a little and stopped by the Canon stand over in Hall 3. Most of the interest was around the 5D Mark II and to a lesser extent the 50D. All of Canons new cameras use the DIGIC 4 processor, which does lots of new fun things including 14-bit colour resolution and 1080p video. With the mad throng of people around the 5D Mark II, I didn't actually get a chance to play with one, but I did take some video. Sadly, I left the appropriate cable at home and probably won't get a chance to upload the video until I get back next week.

The Canon G10 was of surprising interest, since I thought it was just a minor update to the G9. It too uses DIGIC 4 but more importantly has a wider lens than the G9 (28mm versus 35mm on the G9). This makes quite a noticeable difference as you'll see when I post the video. It also does better face detection, can do face detection at oblique angles, has more megapixels, a higher resolution LCD display and a larger optical viewfinder. Interestingly, they've move the exposure compensation settings to a dedicated dial where the ISO settings used to be. The ISO dial and mode dial now sit atop each other on the right hand side, completing the G10's rangefinder-like look.

Another interesting new camera is SD990 IS, which also uses DIGIC 4. Even though it has even more megapixels than previous models, the use of DIGIC 4 apparently means lower noise, so Canon's message is now all about processing power rather than just sensor resolution or noise. The SD990 comes in black or silver and looks very smart indeed. I'm a sucker for metal boded cameras and this does not disappoint, feeling reassuringly sturdy. It is even contoured (in the shape of an athlete's back apparently) and this gives it a somewhat organic softer feeling than if it were an angular slab of metal. Another interesting move and one which hasn't really been well publicised is the use of H.264 as a video codec across the new Canons. The 5D Mark II uses it for its 1080p HD and the SD990 uses it for its VGA quality video, enabling them to put more video on a card. Not sure what the bitrates are, but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

On the video side, there were no surprises and nothing new - all the new updated consumer camcorders were there (HF11, etc.) and the tapeless HD ones are AVCHD based. There were no new tape-based units as far as I could see, perhaps signaling a deinvestment in tape formats in the consumer video space.

Cuts Editing

dsayed — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:33:54 GMT

Here's a hot new feature that will enhance how we do cuts editing in Expression Encoder. We're looking at implementing this in a future version of Expression Encoder - check out the video! :)

Joking aside, this video shows the origin of the term "cuts editing" complete with razor blade and adhesive. I came across this footage on a site operated by former BBC videotape operators. Their site, VTOldBoys, celebrates the history of broadcast VT operation and editing and I applaud them for preserving these nuggets of broadcasting history. According to the website, the video itself was part of an internal BBC training video for VT operators made in 1967 and shot on film. There's also a sequence showing electronic cuts editing.

Next time you curse at the way you fat fingered an edit, your NLE or your computer, think about how far the technology has come.

The Secret Compressionist's Ball

dsayed — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:26:25 GMT

OK, so it wasn't secret and it wasn't a ball either but I couldn't resist the reference. Ben Waggoner hosted a party for video compressionists at NAB this year and I dragged myself there. I was feeling worse for wear not because of over-indulgences in Vegas, but rather the effects of a nasty 76 hour bug I came down with while on the way to Vegas. Coming off 5 hours of booth duty didn't help either. So... not as many videos as I'd like to have had, but we've got a couple of nice little interviews.

Promoscape

First is Tony Houghton from Promoscape in Port Melbourne, Australia. They have over 25 years of experience in the television and video industry and produce DVDs, on-air network promos, programming and pay-per-view DRM downloads.

MainConcept

Next up is Bruce Lidl from MainConcept based in Aachen, Germany. Bruce, however, prefers the sunnier climate of San Diego, California. MainConcept provides codecs for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1 and many others. They provide VC-1 codecs that work across different platforms.

If you want to be in the know about more of Ben's get togethers, please check out the wmtalk mailing list.