Slashdot Mirror

Yep, right there in my email address.

My blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg

For about 3.5 years now, I'd hit the karma cap here will before then :).

Microsoft hasn't commented, which isn't the same as supporting neither. However, considering that silverlight 3.0 is slated to support H.264, I suspect that says a lot by itself.

Silverlight 3's Raw AV pipeline should be able to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Silverlight-3-Beta-Whatrsquos-New-for-Media/

Someone's already working on a port of the Ogg wrapper and Vorbis for Silverlight and Moonlight:

http://veritas-vos-liberabit.com/monogatari/2009/03/moonvorbis.html

I think Microsoft has lost the media wars, and they pretty well know it. (admittedly, just a guess) Expect their products to support H264 and AAC.

It has already been announced a while ago: Silverlight 3 will support H.264 for video, and AAC for audio.

Well, Moonlight's new preview release includes support for Silveright's Raw AV Pipeline:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-Moonlight-20-Preview-Out-ndash-with-Smooth-Streaming/

The Raw AV pipeline would allow Ogg demuxing with Vorbis and Theora decoding to happen inside managed code in Silverlight/Moonlight.

So users who had either installed wouldn't need to install Ogg to get playback. The web site could just detect the plugin and embed a Silverlight player that includes the decoders.

Hmmm. Looks like someone's even working on one for Vorbis at least:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

For HD DVD and Blu-ray authoring, the CineVision PSE system we designed for VC-1 used a hybrid spatial/temporal model.

First, the codec itself was 4-way threaded, encoding each 1920x1080 frame as four slices. Then the file was distributed across multiple blades, each processing a section of the video. Since this was for disc-authoring, we knew where chapters were going to be in advance, and so split by chapter; ideally you'd have at least 2x as many chapters as workers.

The key to avoiding the "chunk transitions" was aligning along chapters, since they almost always start at a scene change or a black frame, so it'd be easy to see the problem. Also, there is extensive 3rd pass support to manually tweak a transition that could go wrong. There was a fair amount of workflow that had to get baked in to get full advantage of the paralleization, like prepopulating each worker with the source during the 1st pass and keeping it cached for the 2nd and potentially 3rd passes.

Anyway, it works nicely; that product was used for 90% or so of HD DVD titles and about a third of Blu-ray titles so far. Last I heard, the record for a 2 hour movie encode was about 6 hours for 2 passes. I'm sure it'd be faster yet with more recent processors. That scaled up to 64-128 cores pretty well, given source chapters. With overlapping scene detection in the first pass, it could be scalable well beyond that for long-form content. Of course, with short content you're not so worried about end-to-end encoding time, but full throughput.

As suggested earlier, live streaming is that hard stuff, since you can't do significant temporal slicing without adding a whole lot of latency.

We have a similar kind of issue with Smooth Streaming for Silverlight, where we encode the same source in multiple bitrates, and need to make sure GOPs are aligned across all the data rates for seamless switching. For an example of that:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Behind-the-Scenes-at-SmoothHDcom-Encoding-Big-Buck-Bunny/

Heck, theyve improved the add-on manager:

http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/21691/

The IE8 blog also lists add-ons as a feature and how to control them via GP.

Not sure what the summary is about. Typically slashdot I guess.

I'm sure MS has a patent on this. So why would I want to use something that will *always* work better on Windows and put Linux developers in the cross-hairs?

The client-side logic for Smooth Streaming is all in managed code, using published APIs. Moonlight should be able to support it fine. IF you're worried about this, jump on the Moonlight 2.0 effort.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Moonlight-10-is-released/

Also, there is a covenant not to sue if that's your concern.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx

And I don't see anything in Silverlight that isn't similarly addressed by HTML5. Ergo, HTML5 is superior for its standardization, true cross-platform support, and competing implementations that can meet the needs of many different ideals.

As I said elsewhere, HTML5 has no way to do anything like this:

http://www.smoothhd.com/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Expression-Encoder-2-Service-Pack-1-ndash-Intro-and-Multibitrate-Encoding/

As for cross-platform, Moonlight 2.0 should be able to run SmoothHD just fine, and more importantly a whole lot of content published using that platform.

On the media side, check out:

http://www.smoothhd.com/

I encoded the "Big Buck Bunny" clip up there :). It's still in pre-alpha, but you should be able to get the idea

This uses a new API called MediaStreamSource, which enables file parsers and protocols to be built in managed code, and then hand off the video and audio bitstreams to Silverlight's built int decoders.

In the case of Smooth Streaming, every two seconds of the video is a seperate http request, and each of those chunks is available in six different data rates. Managed code heuristics running inside of Silverlight dynamically pick the right bitrate for the next chunk based on available CPU power, network speed, and window size (no reason to download 720p if the brower window is shrunk down in a corner of the stream).

And because this is based around small http requests, chunks get proxy cached, so 100 people watching the same video behind the same firewall would only need to get a single copy, providing much better scalability than traditional unicast streaming.

Anyway, this is something that Flash certainly can't do, and I haven't seen any hint of HTML5 being able to do. Pulling it all together requires some pretty specific characteristics of the video decoder (the ability to switch resolutions with a new sequence header without any pause), an API like MediaStreamSource, and having a performant enough runtime to be able to run all the heuristics and parsing without using much CPU.

I blogged the authoring workflow for this and some other details here:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Expression-Encoder-2-Service-Pack-1-ndash-Intro-and-Multibitrate-Encoding/

Even though its a different stream, the fact that the website was willing to put up support for other systems sets an excellent precedent.

Actually, both players consumed the exact same stream. The difference was in the Silverlight application that plays the stream

Stream details:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/

This isn't just about a stream, but a media experience that can incorporate rich media and interactivity. For example, the pop-up stream switcher that's still available in full-screen mode.

Silverlight offers a single plugin that provides XAML + managed code + media support. It's a great fit for developing media player applications that can live in a browser that have features beyond what a classic media player can handle. And then delivering them without having the security issues of installing or running native code, or requiring a user to authenticate or install.

Silverlight 3 will be adding MPEG-4 support, this year, FWIW.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

While I am happy that they made an open source port so quickly however. It is just a hack for a one time occasion. For people with different needs will still be left out in the cold.

No, it was a hack because the current beta is Silverlight 1.0 compatible (no managed code, just JavaScript for control logic) while the main player was Silverlight 2, using managed code.

So what Novell did in an inspirational rush was reimplement a version of the player using JavaScript.

Now that this model works, it'll be availble for other events. Of course, it won't be needed once Moonlight gets to Silverlight 2 parity.

Details from my blog:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/

Miguel de Icaza posted a note this morning saying that after working with MS last night they now have a Moonlight add-on for 32/64-bit and PowerPC Firefox to stream the inauguration live from the official pic2009.org site. The install was quick, although the stream seems to stop and stutter frequently.

• http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-20.html
• http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/

Attention everyone! There is a Silverlight 1.0 player available for PowerPC macs and Moonlight. Details here.

Good news everyone. After burning some midnight oil, we (Microsoft) and Novell have pulled together a Silverlight 1.0 compatible verison of the inauguration player that's compatible with both Moonlight Beta 1 and Silvelight 1.0 on PowerPC Macs.

Miguel's Blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-20.html
My Blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/

The updated player should be up around 6 am EST if you want to validate your installs.

http://pic2009.org/

QuickTime has supported streaming H.264 since well before Flash, and it's coming in the next version of Silverlight as well.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

DivX has a very different useage model than Flash (downloads with a player app instead of streaming to a browser plugin). They're hardly competing head to head.

As for container support, Flash is just MPEG-4. The Adobe model is to use "dumb" media formats and control high-level display functions via the Flash application itself.

That said, a MKV parser could be written for Silverlight via managed code, including caption overlay support, multilanguage audio, etcetera. The Silverlight MediaStreamSource API allows for parsers and protocols to be written in managed code, while still using the native decoders built into Silverlight.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-MediaStreamSource-example-is-up/

That'd be a cool project to see!

QuickTime has supported streaming H.264 since well before Flash, and it's coming in the next version of Silverlight as well.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

DivX has a very different useage model than Flash (downloads with a player app instead of streaming to a browser plugin). They're hardly competing head to head.

As for container support, Flash is just MPEG-4. The Adobe model is to use "dumb" media formats and control high-level display functions via the Flash application itself.

That said, a MKV parser could be written for Silverlight via managed code, including caption overlay support, multilanguage audio, etcetera. The Silverlight MediaStreamSource API allows for parsers and protocols to be written in managed code, while still using the native decoders built into Silverlight.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-MediaStreamSource-example-is-up/

That'd be a cool project to see!

I asked the digital media guys if there were any new features for encoding in Win 7, and they said that it supports up to 8-way threading for WMV encoding! The limit in Vista and XP was 4-way threading.

This requires either 8 cores or 4 hyperthreaded cores, and the resolution of the encoded file be at least 480 pixels tall.

I bet this will get used and abused by benchmarkers. Hopefully they'll use an easy-to-decode source file so that the encoder doesn't get bound by source decode speed.

Nerdy details at my blog:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/8-way-multithreading-in-Windows-7/

If anyone's curious about what's going on under the hood, I did a blog post a bit ago about how Netflix does their VC-1 encoding for the service and how it's evolved over time.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Netflixrsquos-Neil-Hunt-shares-encoding-workflow-info/

For those talking about quality, a few points I want to make:

It won't ever look better than the source; some stuff is only availble in lower quality SD masters. Stuff like "The Office" that comes in as HD looks spectacular at the highest bitrate.

HD (up to 3800 Kbps) quality today is only on devices, while the desktop version only goes up to SD (1500 Kbps).

Those bitrates are averages, with the peaks higher. You'll generally need to be able to sustain 1.5x the listed bitrate in order to reliably get the maximum bitrate band for that content.
Today, the desktop version is SD only

It's hard to imagine any rating system that's more screwed up than the system used in most companies to rate the output of their programmers. If they were consciously trying to sabotage the software, they probably wouldn't come up with any schemes nearly as effective as judging programmers by lines of code produced.

Fully agreed. The other post's anecdote about having trouble getting a review by makign code smaller is quite telling.

Anyway, that kind of measurement certainly isn't done here at Microsoft (although plenty of productive programmers write a lot of lines of code). By example, great stuff like the speed/quality improvements in video playback and scaling in Silverlight 2 didn't really add much or any lines of code; it was about superior design. The guy who wrote that stuff may not rate that highly in KLOC/week, but he's certainly recognized as a rock star.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Silverlight-2-RC0-is-out/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Demo-of-Silverlight-2-scaling-quality-improvements/

It's hard to imagine any rating system that's more screwed up than the system used in most companies to rate the output of their programmers. If they were consciously trying to sabotage the software, they probably wouldn't come up with any schemes nearly as effective as judging programmers by lines of code produced.

Fully agreed. The other post's anecdote about having trouble getting a review by makign code smaller is quite telling.

Anyway, that kind of measurement certainly isn't done here at Microsoft (although plenty of productive programmers write a lot of lines of code). By example, great stuff like the speed/quality improvements in video playback and scaling in Silverlight 2 didn't really add much or any lines of code; it was about superior design. The guy who wrote that stuff may not rate that highly in KLOC/week, but he's certainly recognized as a rock star.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Silverlight-2-RC0-is-out/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Demo-of-Silverlight-2-scaling-quality-improvements/

we get to see silverlight in work as a replacement for what IE was meant for initially, to make windows a requirement to browse the web.

Microsoft is tricky like that - making Windows a requirement by providing a Mac OS X version of Silverlight from day one...

Even since this thing was announced, we knew MS will use silverlight for this...

No, you don't know that since announcement, because in that announcement Microsoft has explicitly stated that Silverlight won't be required to run MS Office Web Apps . You're just trolling.

Meanwhile, here's another MS source, and here's what it says:

Q: Do the Office Web Applications require Internet Explorer?

A: No! Office Web applications will work across multiple platforms and browsers including Safari and Firefox, too.

Q : Is Silverlight required in order to use the Office Web Applications?

A: No! Silverlight is not required. Using Silverlight will enhance the user experience, resulting in sharper images and improved rendering. Also, the Office Live Workspace has integrated Silverlight technology into the multi-file upload function for a better experience there, too.

Q: Will the Microsoft Office Web Applications work on Linux?

A: Yes! It does not matter which operating system is used as long as you're running a supported web browser.

What are you looking for in terms of API or codec info?

Silverlight will be adopting H.264 in its next major version: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

The VC-1 codec is already a SMPTE spec: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1

The Silverlight Xaml vocabulary spec for Silverlight 2 was published in September: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/6/0A6F7755-9AF5-448B-907D-13985ACCF53E/%5BMS-SLXV%5D.pdf

Theora is a codec, equivalent to VC-1 and H.264. It's also a lot less efficient, so you'd get lower quality given a particular bitrate.

AVI is a wrapper, equivalent to AVI, ASF, or MPEG-4. If you're talking about alternatives to AVI for Theora, you probably mean Ogg

But Silverlight itself isn't a media format, but a rich application runtime for browsers based on .net. Silverlight 2 mainly uses WMV as its media format, but it will be addding MPEG-4 and H.264 soon.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

I have no idea what the OP meant about AVI solving all the problems, honestly. It's not a very good wrapper; its main value is simplicity.

My impression was that the amount of Olympics streaming using Silverlight was less than YouTube during the same time period. If so, it doesn't seem like much of a success to me.

If the bar for success for video on the web is deliver more content than YouTube, than there has not been a success in web video since YouTube launched :). 9.9 million hours of video in 17 days is a whole lot of video.

Some better metrics for success might be:
Was it profitable for NBC?
Did viewers get a good experience?
Did it innovate anything new in video delivery?

My biased opinion is "yes" in all three categories.

I've got this blog post with some more details about Silverlight and the Olympics:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Final-Olympics-numbers/

(Calling it a success because people installed silverlight isn't much. Afterall, the same people would have probably installed a rootkit and trojan in order to watch the Olympic streaming. They just don't care.)

People don't care what software they install as long as it delivers what they want? Probably true, but that sounds more like a feature of Silverlight, not a bug.

If a consumer is always aware what technology is in their media player, the player is probably too obtrusive. The user should be mainly aware of the awesome experience.

Silverlight Streaming?

http://streaming.live.com/

It's free for up to 1 GB of storage and 1 TB of transfer a month. File max size is 105 MB, which is plenty for even a short HD clip.

You have to upload in WMV, but an uploaded file is available as both an embedded Silverlight player (Win/Mac, with Linux coming via Moonlight) and a straight link to the WMV playable by tons of tools, including VLC. And Windows Media Player and other tools will let anyone "Save As" from the web link if they want a local copy.

I've got a sample/tutorial on my blog:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Direct-links-to-files-on-Silverlight-Streaming-and-new-All-Stars-clip/

It's one of the few free services that'll give you a straight, ad-free link to the media file.

I saw the article yesterday, but it was so WTFey I just moved on...definitely not Slashdot submission material (especially being a Wired article).

If you really wanted to know what happened to WinFS tech, read this interview by Quentin Clark.

Yes Bill has retired. As you can see from the following video...

http://on10.net/blogs/larry/Bills-Last-Day-CES-2008-Keynote-Video/Default.aspx ...the pressure from Google, Apple and others has finally taken it's toll.
He remains now only as chairman of the board.

I'm always impressed by the enthusaism of Slashdot that leads to people composing the lyrics to mocking songs before actually trying the stuff :). But for the rest of us nerds who like to try stuff, I've got a couple of Creative Commons licensed HD WMV clips I've made that play back nicely in Vista over VGA at full resolution. This should be a clear refutation of the FA.

720p @ 2 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-720p --2-mbps/
1080p @ 10 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-samp le/

Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.

Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.

I'm always impressed by the enthusaism of Slashdot that leads to people composing the lyrics to mocking songs before actually trying the stuff :). But for the rest of us nerds who like to try stuff, I've got a couple of Creative Commons licensed HD WMV clips I've made that play back nicely in Vista over VGA at full resolution. This should be a clear refutation of the FA.

720p @ 2 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-720p --2-mbps/
1080p @ 10 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-samp le/

Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.

Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.

I think our qualty is very competitive with H.264! Bear in mind that the majority of HD optical (HD DVD and BD) discs use VC-1. Did you check out my sample encode?

http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-samp le/

I've got lots of bandwidth - feel free to suggest a scenario where you feel VC-1 isn't competitive, and I'll see if I can come up with a counterexample.

Note that adaptive quantization isn't something particularly magic in x264. Our released VC-1 (WMV9) codec supports Differential Quantization and Adaptive Deadzone.

I just wrote up a blog post about using them in a downloadable 1080p version of the Elephant's Dream clip:

http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-samp le/

The target market is for people who don't install the OS themselves-- they buy a computer from an OEM with the hardware and OS preinstalled. The OEM will make sure that the drives are hot-swappable and such. Adding new drives and merging them into a RAID is done automatically and silently upon plugging the drive in. They'll be happy to make sure you buy only their specially branded "WHS compatible" hot swappable drives for that purpose. I would be surprised if a retail version is even available on shelves.

Single instance storage has existed since at least Windows 2000. The "recover older versions" thing is connected to the "older versions" shell extension, also connected to volume shadow copies, giving you the option to restore from both known backups on file and local VSS copies of a file. Automated remote backups aren't hard to implement with file sharing, and I would think that WHS comes with some simple UI to set it up, with which workstations to backup and corresponding credentials on each.

Remote control uses RDP. I think it will be configured to accept only connections on the local network, and will certainly require some kind of authentication.

See also:
Windows Home Server on Wikipedia
A demo video from MS
an OEM offering from HP

I have to say, this would be pretty neat - take all of the images on Google Images for instance and be able to take a high-def virtual tour of places around the world.

Be sure to check out PlayAnywhere too - another neat tech that's being made over at Microsoft Research.