14 DAY TRIAL // Customers looking to take advantage of the Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming capabilities can now access and download guidance from Microsoft free of charge.
The IIS Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide, updated this month, is live on the Microsoft Download Center, and available both as a Word 2010 doc as well as a PDF file.
The resource is designed to describe in detail Microsoft’s implementation of adaptive streaming technology.
Essentially, Smooth Streaming uses nothing more than standard HTTP in order to perform web-based media delivery. Of course, in order to take advantage of Smooth Streaming, customers will need a range of Microsoft technologies.
“Instead of delivering media as full-file downloads, or as persistent (and thus stateful) streams, the content is delivered to clients as a series of MPEG-4 (MP4) fragments that can be cached at edge servers,” Microsoft explained.
The best part about Smooth Streaming, is that the technology comes with support for full-HD (1080p) streaming experiences on the Web.
At the same time, because of the work done by the Redmond giant, media companies can leverage Smooth Streaming without writing any code of their own, and while benefiting from content management capabilities and content delivery networks.
The guide is a comprehensive overview of Smooth Streaming, and touches a number of aspects related to using the technology.
Customers will be able to learn how to include Smooth Streams, publish media, serving smooth streams, playing smooth streams, etc.
“Smooth Streaming-compatible clients use special heuristics to dynamically monitor current network and local PC conditions and seamlessly switch the video quality of the Smooth Streaming presentation that they receive,” the software giant said.
“As clients play the fragments, network conditions may change (for example, bandwidth may decrease) or video processing may be impacted by other applications that are running.
“Clients can immediately request that the next fragment come from a stream that is encoded at a different bit rate to accommodate the changing conditions.
This enables clients to play the media without stuttering, buffering, or freezing. As a result, users experience the highest-quality playback available, with no interruptions in the stream,” Microsoft added.
IIS Smooth Streaming Client 1.0 RTW is available for download here.
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Alpha is available for download here.
IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta is available for download here.