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If you stream video at all, one priority has to be the ability to reach iDevices, preferably via HTTP Live Streaming, Apple's adaptive product offering. In the past, however, this often required either signing up with a third-party service provider or buying expensive hardware encoders and server capacity. Producers who wanted to produce and manage the iDevice offering in-house had limited lowbudget alternatives to choose from. Recently, an inexpensive option became available from a company that can only be described as a strange bedfellow for Apple - Microsoft.
Specifically, the new capability involves Microsoft's new (ship date June 2010) Expression Encoder 4 and the Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 web server using the IIS Live Smooth Streaming feature. In Expression Encoder 4, you generate a Smooth Streaming MP4 bitstream and transmit that to the IIS server. The server will then rewrap the transport stream from MP4 to the MPEG-2 transport stream used by Apple's HTTP Live Streaming and create the required .m3u8 manifest file; this file tells the iDevices playing the stream where to find and retrieve the video chunks.
Expression Encoder 4 costs $199.95 retail, and pricing information for the required Windows Server 2008 R2 SPl Beta is available at www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/ en/us/pricing. aspx. Pricing is based on the edition and number of client access licenses. John Deutscher wrote an excellent tutorial of the entire workflow, including Expression Encoder and US Media Services, which you can read at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/ 8 54/live -smooth-stre aming-for-iis-7- - apple - http-live-streaming (see Tim Siglin's "First Look: IIS Media Services 4," pp. 26-32). What I'll do in this short review is work through the Expression Encoder workflow and test the quality and performance of Expression Encoder to determine what type of computer you'll need to make it work for a live broadcast.
Expression Encoder 4: What's New
I reviewed Expression Encoder 3 in December 2009. You can read that review at www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/ Fe a ture d- Art i cíes /Re view- Micro so ftExpression-Encoder-3-65649.aspx. In version 4, the interface and workflow have...