14 DAY TRIAL // The past week, Microsoft started offering a wave of updates ushering in the next version of IIS Media Services. Softpedia readers have already been informed of the fact that IIS Media Services 4.0 has reached the Beta development stage, and that the bits are now up for grabs and testing. As a part of the IIS Media Services refresh, the Redmond company is offering customers additional downloads on top of the Beta. In this regard, IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta is accompanied by the IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Alpha, now also available for download from the software giant.
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 is designed to lend a helping hand to customers that have already produced content for delivery, but that still want to take advantage of Smooth Streaming. Essentially, what Microsoft is offering is a convertor delivering a powerful set of features designed to automatically tailor media for use with IIS Media Services.
“We are launching a new feature of IIS Media Services called Transform Manager, which provides simple integrated video encoding and batch conversion of video files to IIS Smooth Streaming format and the MPEG-2 Transport Stream adaptive streaming format supported by Apple devices. Transform Manager also integrates directly with Expression Encoder 4 Pro to allow you to use ‘watch folders’ to queue up multiple encoding jobs on your server and deliver them directly to IIS Media Services 4 web folders as IIS Smooth Streaming presentations, complete with Silverlight player templates,” Microsoft’s John Deutscher revealed.
According to the Redmond company, IIS Transform Manager 1.0 brings to the table a range of capabilities, including batch encoding of on-demand videos, job scheduling, and job management. Early adopters that will test-drive the release will only be able to run it on a single IIS server while leveraging the local Task Scheduler for job management. The promise from Microsoft is that the tool will grow in time with capabilities such as scaling-out Transform Manager support.
“Transform Manager can also convert your IIS Smooth Streaming presentations directly into MPEG-2 Transport Streams and .m3u8 manifests for delivering content to Apple devices. We ship Transform Manager with several example Job Templates and Watch Folder configurations that enable you to drag-and-drop WMV and MP4 files into watch folders (or set up FTP or WebDav on your IIS server to upload content to your watch folders) and Transform Manager will automate the encoding to Smooth Streaming file format using Expression Encoder 4 Pro, transmux the output from EE4 to MPEG-2 Transport stream and create .m3u8 playlists, and then copy your generated media files to a uniquely named IIS web site for immediate playback,” Deutscher added.
IIS Transform Manager 1.0 Alpha is available for download here. IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta is available for download here.