Does Windows Azure supports IIS Live Smooth Streaming?
By default the nodes on which our apps. run doesn't support Live Smooth Streaming (also you need to have access to the IIS for live smooth streaming). Instead you can set up a Windows Server 2008 with IIS on a VM role, use Blobs for the content and CDNs for delivery. Also you can use some workers role for encoding. The MS Expression Encoder 4.0 has an API ready to be used for media enconding.
If you have multimedia that you want streamed I would look into Azure CDN http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/cdn/ or Azure Blob Storage and Silverlight as an adaptive smooth streamer http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/streamingazure for your IIS Live Smooth Streaming.
You could check out Microsoft Nimbus Media Service - IIS Smooth Streaming Service in the cloud. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-services/
I am a PM in IIS team (Azure Media Service). We launched Nimbus a month before and currently it is in preview. You could apply through the link above to get early access.
Doing a quick google search:
http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Azure+Smooth+Streaming
Steve Marx, PM for windows Azure has two blog posts you may want to have a look at.
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/publishing-adaptive-streaming-video-from-expression-encoder-to-windows-azure-blobs
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/smooth-streaming-with-windows-azure-blobs-and-cdn
Both have been very helpful to me.
Steve is #smarx on twitter. I'm sure he'll be able to help you.
Related
To clarify: I have a website hosted in Azure. I want to add a 1.5 minute howto video. I can't imagine it will get shown more than a few tens or hundreds a month (maybe a few thousand if the site takes off).
I was planning on using Azure Media Player to play the video.
In relation to this I thought the video would sit in a streaming endpoint.
But this seems an expensive way of doing this. Are there better ways (especially cheaper)?
EDIT: is it possible to host the video elsewhere and have it embedded in Azure?
The cheap way to do this would be to place the video in a blob storage then play it using a web page.
There is a video explaining how to do this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmzns7PgP0A
I would recommended to use Media Service: video-on-demand, content delivery service with an Azure Media Services application in the Azure portal.
Azure Media Services lets you deliver any media, on virtually any device, to anywhere in the world using the cloud. The collection of services provide encoding, live or on-demand streaming, content protection and indexing for video and audio content.
The Windows Azure Media Services platform has four types of services: content uploading, encoding, encrypting content and streaming.
Media Service Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/media-services/
Additional information : Streaming Videos from Azure ( Blob or Media Services)
If I was to use Azure Media Services to consume encoding of small video files and then playing back on a web app and mobile app, do i need to turn on the 'Streaming Endpoint' option? I am getting charged ~$65 a month just to have streaming endpoint, not sure if i need it.
The pricing doesn't quite make sense because I can get the same basic features from Vimeo for $7 a month.
Am I consuming this correctly?
If I was to use Azure Media Services to consume encoding of small video files and then playing back on a web app and mobile app, do i need to turn on the 'Streaming Endpoint' option?
Yes, the official documentation explains that a streaming endpoint is the service that delivers content directly to the client application for live-streaming, video on demand, or progressive download.
So this means that you would need at least one streaming endpoint to be able to serve your videos to a client. A Media Services account already includes a default standard streaming endpoint. According to the documentation, this default streaming endpoint would be enough for the vast majority of workloads.
Take a look at the pricing page for more info: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/media-services/
According to the pricing page, the default streaming endpoint does cost ~$65/mo.
In regards to your comparison with Vimeo, the service that you end up using really depends on your particular case. While I understand pricing is a big factor when building an application, you should still consider the security of your videos at rest and in transit, scalability, availability of services, support, etc.
So, I'm working on an application where admins will be able to upload videos, for others to view on different platforms (mobile devices, computers etc). It is to be hosted on Azure, and I'm having a bit difficulty figuring out if I need to use Media services or simply a CDN.
When does it make sense to use the Media services over simply uploading to a blob and viewing through CDN? What are the advantages of using one over another?
Microsoft Azure CDN pulls content from Azure Media Services streaming server, so you could stream your content from the edge. You don't have to use a CDN if you don't need to deliver content in a large scale at a time. Rather, you could directly streaming content from streaming server offered by Azure Media Services.
The reason you maybe confused is because there are CDN vendors in the market (such as Akamai) offers streaming server capability. But by CDN itself, the edge network was just for caching the bits, not acting like a streaming server.
Cheers,
Mingfei Yan
Previously I'm using Amazon AWS, now I'm moving to Microsoft Bizspark program which can use azure for free for certain limitation. I'm new to azure, and I want to setup RTMP live streaming with CDN. I'm using FlowPlayer in my website and OBS software to broadcast my live stream. Can I use Azure CDN with RTMP live streaming ?
Azure Media Services supports ingesting live feeds using RTMP and uses Dynamic Packaging to dynamically transmuxe live streams for delivery in MPEG-DASH, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, or Adobe HDS formats.
You can use Azure Media Player and Wirecast instead of Flow Player and OBS Software. You can follow this article to setup the live streaming.
Can I have persistent encoding job in Azure?
I want to upload video stream into page blob and encode it on the fly when new portion of data is available.
Can it be done with azure or I need 3rd party solution like wowza?
Adding to the comments of David Makogon - no, currently you cannot achieve your goal. The current state of Azure Media Services works only for Video-On-Demand. What you need is more like a live streaming.
For live streaming you can use IIS Media Services. You can install IIS Media Services along with the Transform Manager Extension. To almost fully achieve your goal. And you can do this on a Windows Server image of Azure Virtual Machine.
To achieve elasticity and scalability however will not be an easy task.
To conclude - the current state of all Azure services is not 100% suitable for your scenario. And it does not provide out-of-the-box solution for your need. If you find a 3rd party provider that suits your needs today, then just go ahead and test/use it.