Thanks for the link, this is cool stuff. Can you clarify, however, what specifically you mean by “Adobe Video”? H.264/AAC in a F4V file? H.263/MP3 in a FLV file? Are you using any custom built decoders?

http://blog.domaindotnet.com/2009/04/05/silverlight_3_beta_adobe_video_playerworking_now/

I also am now working with one of the featured digital media companies features at MIX 09. I am certainly looking forward to all the amazing opportunity I see unfolding.

Damon Wilder Carr

Once again thank you for the information provided. The information will help us with our engineering effort.

Your last answer to was particularly interesting and I’m wondering if you can point me in the right direction to get us going as an ISV.

Our product, plays back video with synchronized slides and currently uses Silverlight to playback video for cross platform support. However, we’re in the process of using silverlight applications to create richer experience for playback.

In addition we have the encoding side that is deployed on our hardware and uses DirectShow to encode media and capture slides from a VGA/DVI source. We use Windows Media Services to distribute media and are all excited with the prospect of using IIS for obvious reasons that you explain in your presentation.

I can share more information with you and point you to some of our work over personal mail.(Oh and I guarantee you’ll find these applications exciting like some of the applications you demonstrated as part of your MIX presentation ). BTW, we are a Microsoft Partner.

Thanks
Dharmesh

1. Good question. So called “trick play” is still not available natively in Silverlight 3 runtime, but we’re currently investigating possible workarounds to make this work for Smooth Streaming at least. We have some flexibility there because Smooth Streaming sources play back through the MediaStreamSource API which allows sample-level control, but we’ll see.

2.
a. We are working on SDKs that would provide ISVs with an easy way of creating Smooth Streaming-compatible MP4 files, but I don’t have anything to announce yet regarding general availability. These SDKs would operate on a lower level than DirectShow (most likely as static libs) so it’d be up to the developer to wrap them into a DirectShow filter.
b. Windows 7 will include a H.264 decoder, but it will be in the form of an MFT (Media Foundation Transform), not a DirectShow filter. I don’t know it there will be an encoder counterpart MFT.

3. Our priority is to first enable 3rd party ISVs to add Smooth Streaming support to their products in order to start building a healthy Smooth Streaming ecosystem. After that we will start looking at what we can do to make Smooth Streaming SDKs and tools more accessible to the wider development community. We have limited resources so we must prioritize accordingly. Another important thing to keep in mind is that the Smooth Streaming technology is still in beta. Even the format specification hasn’t been fully stabilized yet so that’s one of the major reasons why we’re currently working with a limited number of encoding ISV partners