http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/bobc/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=23

We will be announcing all the details at MIX and NAB next month, so stay tuned for more exciting news, including some framework name changes too. ;)

After we showed at NAB back in April that Silverlight and Smooth Streaming could be used to deliver 3D video to anaglyph glasses and external 3D-ready TVs, I also started talking to NVIDIA about the prospect of integrating Silverlight with their 3D Vision technology which utilizes active shutter glasses. As it turned out, NVIDIA was already 2 steps ahead of me and had already made significant progress getting 3D Vision to work with Silverlight, so when the opportunity came along to do a 3D streaming project with Turner Sports we all immediately saw it as a chance to do something innovative and cool. With our trusted partner iStreamPlanet on-board to do the player development and video delivery, the stage was set for building a cutting-edge 3D video experience.

NVIDIA first integrated support for 3D Vision into the latest Silverlight Media Framework which iStreamPlanet then used as the foundation for a rich 3D video player complete with an interactive leaderboard, pre-roll ads and companion ads. But iStreamPlanet didn’t just stop there – they also built stereoscopic play controls that work in 3D mode and seamlessly blend with the 3D video, which is a non-trivial task when dealing with stereoscopic presentations.

While we won’t be able to claim the title of first 3D event streamed over the Internet, there are a few “firsts” which still make this an important milestone event in video streaming:

• This will be the first time you’ll be able to watch true 3D video inside a browser with just a common browser plugin (Silverlight) and no need for a standalone 3D player. (By “true 3D” I mean “discrete stereo images delivered to each eye at 60 Hz”. In other words, no anaglyph or interlaced passive.)
• If you’re familiar with 3D Vision, you’ll know that so far it’s only been possible to use it in full screen mode. Well, this will be the first time you’ll be able to watch 3D video using NVIDIA 3D Vision in windowed mode too!
• This will be the first publicly broadcast live 3D event using HTTP-based adaptive streaming technology, namely Smooth Streaming

Turner Broadcasting will produce the 3D video in Daytona and beam it to iStreamPlanet in Las Vegas via satellite as 1080i side-by-side formatted “frame compatible” video. Using the side-by-side format will allow iStreamPlanet to leverage their existing live video workflow to deliver 3D video to Silverlight clients without requiring any changes to the workflow or the encoders. The frame-compatible 1080i video will feed into the Inlet Spinnaker HD encoders which will transcode it into the Smooth Streaming format at 6 bitrates/resolutions, with VC-1 and WMA Pro as the video and audio codecs, respectively. The transcoded steresocopic video will preserve the side-by-side formatting of the source.

Unlike with traditional Smooth Streaming broadcasts, the minimum bitrate/resolution for this 3D event will be slightly raised to provide sufficient quality even at half-resolution per eye. Therefore, the minimum resolution/bitrate will be 480×224 @ 600 kbps, while the top bitrate/resolution will remain the typical 1280×720 @ 3.45 Mbps. This means that at its highest quality you’ll be able to see a 640×720 image in each eye. While I’m well aware that’s not full 720p quality per eye, do keep in mind that we’re only just getting started with 3D Internet streaming – so this is only the beggining and it can only get better from here! Rome wasn’t built in a day. ;)

For a minimum 3D experience you will need at least 700 kbps of bandwidth (600 kbps video + 48 kbps audio + overhead) but if that’s all the bandwidth you’ve got I recommend that you watch the video in windowed mode. If you plan on enjoying the full screen 3D experience, I do recommend at least 3.5 Mbps of bandwidth or otherwise you might find yourself somewhat disappointed.

The TNT RaceBuddy 3D site is now available if you’d like to test drive the 3D player and ensure your computer meets the minimum system requirements for Saturday’s race. If you have an NVIDIA 3D Vision-enabled PC running Windows 7 or Vista, you will need the latest GeForce (or Quadro) and 3D Vision drivers installed in order to enjoy the RaceBuddy 3D experience. Needless to say, you will also need the latest version of Silverlight 4.

If you don’t have NVIDIA 3D Vision but have a nice 3D-ready TV hooked up to your PC or Mac, you’ll be happy to know that you’ll still be able to enjoy RaceBuddy 3D. Just set your desktop size to 1280×720, then fire up the RaceBuddy 3D player and tell it you have a 3DTV. When playback starts, send the player to full screen and it will show you the raw side-by-side video in 720p. All you have to do then is configure your 3DTV for a side-by-side source (left field first) and you’ll be good to go!

Note: Though NVIDIA and iStreamPlanet have successfully completed this first build of a 3D Vision-enabled Silverlight player, we are still working on figuring out how to best make that code available to all Silverlight developers, so stay tuned to my blog for more details on that in the future.

• Silverlight availability on Broadcom and Intel systems-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, which will enable set-top-box manufacturers to run Silverlight applications on their devices
• IIS Media Services 4.0 with support for Smooth Streaming over multicast networks, transmuxing support for similar HTTP-based adaptive streaming formats such as the one for Apple iPhone/iPad, low latency delivery, and Smooth Streaming H.264 DRM (PlayReady AES) support – beta availability in Q3 2010
• Silverlight Media Framework 2 with a new, more modular architecture featuring an extensive plug-in API for 3rd-party developers and partners
• Silverlight Analytics Framework for integrating business intelligence analytics into Silverlight applications
• Expression Encoder 4 with support for Live Smooth Streaming

Among other news, we’ve announced that Silverlight plug-in adoption has reached 60% globally. On Tuesday we officially launched Visual Studio 2010 and on Thursday we released Silverlight 4, a mere 3 years since our original release of Silverlight 1.0! Remember, Visual Studio 2010 lets you develop Silverlight applications not just for the desktop, but also for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices. Make sure to install the latest Silverlight 4 runtime here: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/

Full coverage of Microsoft’s Silverlight announcements at NAB 2010:  http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/microsoft-silverlight-recap-at-nab-2010/

The demo that generated a lot of buzz at the Microsoft booth and one that’s very close to my heart was the demo of Live 3D HD video streaming powered by IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight. We partnered with TVN Group, Inlet Technologies, Level(3) Communications and THX to deliver a compelling demo showing that Smooth Streaming can be used to efficiently deliver stereoscopic 3D video over the Internet to multiple screens and display technologies.

TVN Group set up a stereoscopic camera rig in a radio station in Hannover, Germany (the radio station was chosen because it operates 24/7, allowing us to have an active live feed in Las Vegas even when it’s nighttime in Germany). They converted the two 1080i feeds into a single 1080i25 side-by-side feed which was then fed into an Inlet Spinnaker 7100 encoder. The encoder produced Smooth Streaming output at 4 quality levels: bottom one at 400×224 @ 500 kbps, top one at 1280×720 @ 3 Mbps. The streams were published to an IIS7 origin server on Level3′s network and carried by Level3 to their edge servers in the United States where we consumed them at our NAB booth (over the open Internet; we didn’t use a dedicated connection).

At our booth we demonstrated 2 playback scenarios:

1. Our regular demo pods were running a Silverlight player application (built on Silverlight Media Framework) inside the browser and were connected to conventional LCD displays. Using pixel shader effects in Silverlight (the code for which I hope to make available in the near future) we dynamically converted the side-by-side stereoscopic video into a red-cyan anaglyph image, viewable using widely available anaglyph glasses such as these. We also demonstrated Silverlight’s ability to display only a 2D “mono” version of the stream (left-eye only view), as well as the ability to dynamically switch between different anaglyph methods (monochrome and color).
2. In our living room area, we had another PC running the same Silverlight application out-of-browser as well as THX Media Director software. This PC was connected via HDMI to a 3D-ready 120Hz Panasonic plasma display (THX certified) equipped with active shutter glasses. With a click of a button, the Silverlight application would switch to side-by-side full screen view and send a command to the THX software which in turn would inject appropriate 3D metadata into the HDMI output stream, instructing the HDMI 1.4a compatible TV to automatically switch to frame-compatible side-by-side 3D mode. The TV would then deliver the video as frame sequential 120Hz video to the active shutter glasses, creating a superior 3D video experience.

We didn’t make any announcement at NAB regarding support for 3D video yet, but our demo (hopefully) showed that Smooth Streaming is a great way to deliver stereoscopic 3D video over the Internet to a variety of displays while fully utilizing the power and scalability of HTTP adaptive streaming.

Two videos of me talking about the 3D demo:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/NAB-Silverlight-in-3D/
http://www.newmediawebinars.com/tv/the-digital-scene/nab/stereoscopic-video-on-the-web-with-microsoft-silverlight-nab/