Smooth Streaming Test #3!

http://smooth.ch9.ms/

Hey Guys, I'd love to hear feedback on test 3 for smooth streaming on Channel 9.  With IIS Smooth Streaming Beta 2 and a bunch of encoding tweaks, it *should* be vastly improved from the first test.  This is about the video, not about the player features.  

I have a bunch of different video types.  The one video with text right away is the MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta video.  If you're worried about how text will look, check out that video.  If there is a visual issue, please put in a screen shot so I can see the visual issue.  clint.rutkas@microsoft.com

http://smooth.ch9.ms/

For the player, I hear you about wanting the ability to switch to buffering so that feedback is not lost.

spivonious said:

Much improved! I had zero buffering screens, fairly good quality once it got going (about 1-2 seconds in) and could jump around the videos pretty much instantaneously.

 

With what I assume is the lowest quality the text is pretty much unreadable, but it's fine for the non-text videos. One step up from that is perfectly fine for all but the smaller text on his desktop.

 

With my crappy connection here at work, I'm very impressed that it starts playing as fast as it does and can manage decent quality.

w00t!

CKurt said:

Very Very good! The first load of the player itself take a while because the app is loading but the video loads very well and seeking works like perfection! Very Very good experience! Also with chapters comming up it will be heaven!

 

I have a question about the technology:

# How far ahead does it buffer? I mean lets say I start watching a 50 minute charles video and haveway stop watching (for some reason) and close my browser. Will it have allready buffer that other 25 minutes? Or will it only buffer one minute ahead (and will i see it buffering like i see the current video's buffer with more brith white seek bar?

 

# Sometimes I watch the video and afterwards think. This is a really good video this is one I'll need to watch again I'll download it so I have it available for a time I don't have an internet connection. But then downloading it requires me to 'sacrifice' another 500Mb of file transfer althoug I'm sure I have it somewhere downloaded in a temp form of silerlight storage. It there any way to 'save' the stream after watching? Thus not downloading the sae 500mb again (since i download WMV high and I guess that is the file played in the silerlight player)

 

PS sorry if I rambeld on...

1>  It will read to whatever the time buffer is set to, the default is 30 seconds.  Also overriding this will cause side effects for stream switching.  And even if the stream is paused, the given stream currently giving data is based off computer, player size and bandwidth qulaity.  So even if it is paused and buffering, you won't get a 2mb stream if the player thinks you can't play a 2mb stream or don't need a 2mb stream for the player size.  A big thing with adaptive streaming is why give you a massive stream if the player size can't even display all that data.

2>  If you want to rewatch the video and worried about bandwidth, I'd lean toward downloading it.  I can put in a feature bug into the player to explore if I can do that on either buffered or adaptive streaming.  I'd also feel more confident in being able to save a buffered stream than an adaptive stream but I'm not sure if this is even possible.

Blue Ink said:

It's really good.

 

Mike Taulty's video (MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta) is pretty pixelated at the beginning, but it gets better in 10 seconds or so, and becomes crystal clear after just 15-25 seconds.

 

Quite impressed.

Can you email me a screenshot?  clint.rutkas@microsoft.com

W3bbo said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

Same experience as me, blocky and pixellated to begin with, but much better quality later. I get about 120-130ms ping to smooth.ch9.ms btw.

 

But my issues with C9 were rarely with the streaming (and when I did have streaming issues it was because I had a dodgy connection), they were mainly with the player. Speaking of which, are video streams resumable? If I'm watching over wifi and lose my connection, does the player have to redownload it all when I get reconnected or will it keep its buffer and play what's been downloaded?

With adaptive, it only grabs what it needs.  It starts out thinking you're a low bandwidth user then ramps up as needed.  If you can't support a stream, it puts you on a lower one.  The end goal is instant streaming with zero hiccups.

On network failure, with the player as shown, it doesn't not appear to fail gracefully. 

If you refresh and jump to where you left off on both buffered and adaptive, you shouldn't download the area you jumped.

dentaku said:

It took almost 30 sec for the MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta video to get totally clear then I tried it again later and it only took 15 sec before it jumped into good quality. I'm not sure if the other videos had the same problem because they don't have small text in them.

The http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming demo only takes 5 to 9 seconds to get good and clear.

I have a 15mbit cable connection.

it all depends on the data streams getting sent.  If the player thinks it isn't getting enough to sustain a certian bitrate stream, it will drop down.

For the two different experiences, the network connection could have been saturated at one point and not the another point in time.