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Last month, Mingfei Yan (Program Manager for Azure Media Services) invited me to be co-presenter of the “Building End-To-End Video Experiences with Azure Media Services Media Services” session at //build/ 2014. In our presentation we briefly introduced Microsoft Azure Media Services, explaining the steps involved in a Video On-Demand workflow and showing some demos on how to use the Azure Management Portal and the Extension SDK for .NET. We also presented some new features, including HLS version 3 support, more Secure Delivery options, Live Streaming and fast sub-clipping.
In this post, you will find a summary of the content shown in the session along with several useful resources. The session recording will be available soon on Channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/3-610, and the slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/mingfeiy/build-2014-building-endtoend-video-experience-with-azure-media-services
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Media Services Introduction
Mingfei started the session by explaining the current Media industry challenges of building a solution that provides high quality videos for any device anywhere and at any time, and how Microsoft Azure Media Services can help us to solve them. She also went through the Media Services architecture built on top of the Microsoft Azure platform.
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Video On-Demand (VOD)
Mingfei continued by breaking down the steps involved in a Video On-Demand (VOD) workflow using Azure Media Services: Ingest, Encode, Package, Encrypt and Deliver. She also highlighted the Dynamic Packaging feature and the brand new support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) version 3. We also showed two demos for the Video On-Demand (VOD) services:
1. Azure Management Portal.
Mingfei showed how you can use the portal to list your assets, ingest a new mezzanine file and then transcode it to an adaptive bitrate MP4 set asset.
2. Extensions SDK for .NET.
I showed how to write a very simple VOD workflow using the Extensions SDK for .NET that publishes an asset for adaptive streaming by creating an Origin locator and generating the Smooth Streaming, HLS and MPEG-DASH dynamic packaging URLs. To demonstrate this, I used a players Web Site that leverages different Display Modes to choose the appropriate dynamic packaging URL for each device:
- Desktop (default): Smooth Streaming in a Flash player with the Smooth Streaming plugin for OSMF, and MPEG-DASH in an HTML5 dash.js player
- Windows Phone: MPEG-DASH in an HTML5 dash.js player (this works starting with the Windows Phone 8.1 update)
- iOS and Mac OS: HLS v4 in a HTML5 video element
- Android: HLS v3 in a HTML5 video element
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You can find the source code of the VOD demos in the azuremediaservices-build2014 GitHub repository at https://github.com/mconverti/azuremediaservices-build2014/tree/master/VODDemos.
Secure Delivery options (private preview feature)
After that, Mingfei explained the new options available in private preview to secure the media delivery to serve both encrypted HLS and Smooth Streaming to client devices:
- Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128 clear key dynamic encryption
- Microsoft PlayReady Digital Rights Management (DRM) content access and protection technology
She also showed a demo on how to dynamically encrypt Smooth Streaming content with AES and play it back in a Windows Store application. For more details about the new Security Delivery options, you can check out her blog post: Announcing PlayReady as a service and AES dynamic encryption with Azure Media Services.
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Live Streaming and Fast Sub-Clipping (private preview features)
Finally, we ended the session by showing the Live Streaming private preview feature. Mingfei briefly explained the new Live Streaming concepts and entities and how they work. Then, I ran a demo leading the audience through the following steps:
1. Manage Channels and Programs from the Azure Management Portal.
I showed the new Channels tab in the Azure Management Portal that lets you create, remove, update and list the channels and programs in the live-enabled account. The portal works on top of the Live Services REST API, so this means that all the operations available there (and even more) can be easily automated/scheduled in a Live Streaming workflow.
2. Start a live stream.
To do this, I used an encoding software running on my machine to encode the stream from my camera to Smooth Streaming format and send it to the Ingest URL of the channel. We needed an encoder because the Live Encoding feature is not yet ready, so we had to encode the original camera stream into multiple bitrates before sending it to the channel. To verify that the channel was receiving my input, I used the Preview URL player from the Azure Management Portal (the Preview URL it is a tech-check to let us know if the channel is receiving the output from the encoder). Everything worked as expected, and I started a “real” live stream through the Origin servers by clicking the Start Streaming button in the portal. This triggers the following operations behind the scenes:
- Create a new asset
- Create a new program and associate it with the asset
- Start the program
- Create an origin locator for the program asset to enable adaptive streaming through the Origin servers
3. Dynamic Packaging with Live Streams
To demonstrate that dynamic packaging also works with live stream assets, I used a players Web Site that leverages different Display Modes to choose the appropriate dynamic packaging URL for each device (very similar to the one I used for the VOD demo):
- Desktop (default): Smooth Streaming in a Flash player with the Smooth Streaming plugin for OSMF, and MPEG-DASH in an HTML5 dash.js player
- Windows Phone: MPEG-DASH in an HTML5 dash.js player (this works starting with the Windows Phone 8.1 update)
- iOS and Mac OS: HLS v4 in a HTML5 video element
- Android: HLS v3 in a HTML5 video element
4. Fast Sub-Clipping
I showed the new fast sub-clipping feature that allows you to create a highlight from an asset while it is still a live stream. To do this, I prepared a Microsoft Media Platform Video Editor (formerly RCE) deployment with custom providers to get assets from my live-enabled Media Services account. I used this tool to easily choose the begin and end positions and submit the sub-clip generation to Media Services (this only took a few seconds). You can go back in the live stream playback to choose the sub-clip positions thanks to the Program DVR Window, which is the amount of viewable content available before the live position.
5. Live to VOD transition
Finally, I stopped the program from the Azure Management Portal to show the seamless transition between Live and VOD; the full live archive is immediately available as VOD using the same dynamic packaging URLs after the live event ends. This also applies to the sub-clips created while the asset was still a live stream.
For more information about the new Media Services features, you can check out the NAB 2014 Announcements from Media Services blog post by John Deutscher (Principal Program Manager Lead for Azure Media Services).
Enjoy!
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