Live Smooth Streaming: Try It Now, No Encoder Required

Announced at the MIX09 keynote, Live Smooth Streaming was released for download (WebPI, x86, x64) on Wednesday. You don’t need a live encoder to try this at home. Read below for the how…

What is Live Smooth Streaming?

Live Smooth Streaming provides the same great user experience as its Video On-Demand counterpart, using the same scalable delivery method that takes full advantage of commodity HTTP caches. In short, a user experience that…

  • Starts playback and seeks instantly
  • Does not stop to buffer
  • Deliver the best quality your bandwidth and CPU allow at the moment

Live Smooth Streaming archives incoming data and provides a full Network Digital Video Recorder (DVR). It works just like a TiVo for online video, with support for replay, pause, and jumping back to the live broadcast. If you start watching a broadcast late, you can always jump back to see what you missed, and then resume watching the live broadcast.

How can I try Live Smooth Streaming?

See the “Getting Started” walkthrough for detailed instructions. In a nutshell the steps are:

Open a browser and enjoy the experience. The pushencoder tool in the Starter Kit also allows you to simulate a live broadcast from any Smooth Streaming assets you have created with Expression Encoder. From a command line, simply supply the URL of the publishing and the path to the .ism file for your asset with a command like:

pushencoder64 <url-of-publishingpoint> <ism-file>

Can the Beta really do Live broadcasts?

Yes! At Thursday’s IIS Media Services session MIX09, we (IIS and Inlet) had a lot of fun pulling back the curtain on an end-to-end broadcast setup including an uncompressed signal source, encoders, server, and client. You can watch the recording of the session online (seek to 60:00 for the Live Smooth Streaming demo) at:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T56F

Where can I learn more?

Check out the IIS Media Services page, the Live Smooth Streaming feature page, and the walkthrough on “Creating and Managing Publishing Points”. Please feel free leave any questions you may have as comments, and I will gladly address them in a future post.

On behalf of the entire team, it’s our pleasure to make the Beta available for download. We’d love to hear about your experience and any feedback you may have.

--John

3 Comments

  • Hi, I use pushencoder tool to push the content from an external harddisk connected to IIS server via USB port onto the publishing point. Test is successful. I can stream the video smoothly. When I disconnect the external hdd from IIS server, I can still watch the movie. I was expecting not to be able to do so. I disabled the archive media option on publishing point settings. Even if I do that, IIS server caches some content under C:\inetpub\media\archives\Default Web Site Maybe this makes it possible to watch? I cleared the cache of the browser, I can still watch. ~~~DOES THIS MEAN, ALL THE ON-DEMAND CONTENT WILL/SHOULD RESIDE ON IIS SERVER? If that is the case, there is a scalability problem, isn't there?~~~ Before I push the content, the state of the publishing point is "starting". OK During push, it is "started". OK After the pushencoder command does it's job, the status is "stopped". But I can still watch the movie? --------------------- And what does "Wait status is 0" mean which is displayed at the end of the result logs of pushencoder? ----------------- And, if I deselect both "Archive media" and "Allow client connections" checkboxs under Publishing Point Details/Advanced Settings, I get the following error on my browser: "Failed to download manifest: d" It doesn't work... ------------Thanks a lot!

  • Is any problems with the version of pushencoder that is in the Live Smooth Streaming Starter Kit ?

    When i try to experiement Live Smooth Streaming, everything seems to be OK, but i haven't any video in my Silverlight Client. So the Manifest is strange and it indicate 0 chunks, and i have the value fourCC="" .
    I think it is a pushencoder64/32 problems ? no ?

  • I want to know that which player supports http live smooth streaming . I am using IIS and expression encoder pro 4 . The videos are encoded in h.264 format.
    I do not want to use silver light at the client side . Please help me

    Thanks in advance.

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