Media Solutions Architect Jit Gosh recaps day 1 from the Microsoft booth at NAB.

I spent the first day of NAB mostly at our booth, and was floored by the amount of new technologies we are demonstrating. It will take a few posts to list all of them out, but here are a few that have me super excited!!

Silverlight Media Framework

If you are looking to build a video player experience in Silverlight that leverages our Smooth Streaming technology, look no further than the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF). SMF allows you to very quickly build a robust and scalable media player that can take full advantage of all the smooth streaming goodness – bitrate switching, in-stream and in-manifest metadata, multiple camera tracks, full customizability of look and feel using Silverlight templates etc. We just announced version 2 of the framework last week, and this version is even more exciting. We now support a fully modular architecture using a Managed Extensibility Framework based plugin model, that allows you to compose your own custom application functionality with the player framework. We also support advertising standards like VAST and MAST, timed text standards like DFXP for captioning, support for multiple audio tracks etc. For more info check out the SMF page on CodePlex at http://smf.codeplex.com/.

Silverlight Enhanced Movies

Silverlight Enhanced movies is a framework that allows you to package your video content in a Blu-Ray/virtual DVD style application, with full support for menuing, scene maps, overlay hotspots, multiple switcheable audio tracks, multi-language captioning, movie extras such as commentaries, cast and crew information etc. SLEM supports both local viewing (download and play), as well as streamed viewing with download to own options. SLEM is also full ready for paid content with full support for both online and offline DRM powered by Microsoft PlayReady DRM. We are working hard to have SLEM be available on several mobile form factors including our very own Windows Phone 7 devices. If you are a content producer and want to package your digital content for online or physical media based delivery utilizing Silverlight, SLEM could be a very exciting framework for you to adopt. We do not have a public web site yet for SLEM, but if you are interested – do send me an email.

Live 3D Streaming

We are demonstrating live 3D streaming in both a 10-foot (living room with a big screen TV) and a 2-foot(personal computer) scenario utilizing Smooth Streaming. For the 10 foot experience we are using a 3D capable monitor with shutter glasses and for the 2 foot experience we are using anaglyph glasses to achieve stereoscopic 3D, with Silverlight and pixel shading combined to facilitate the anaglyph processing. You have to see it to believe it – so do stop by and take a look.

That’s it for this post - more later in the day. If you are not at NAB, and want to know more about any of these do send me an email at pghosh@microsoft.com.

Jit Gosh