IIS Live Smooth Streaming setup

This document provides the steps to setup IIS Live Smooth Streaming using the following components:

IIS Media Services 3.0 \ 4.0 \ 4.5 Beta

Expression Encoder 4.0

 

IIS Media Services 3.0 x86 : https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc4e95b0-e4de-456e-8254-a5047eabcd01

IIS Media Services 3.0 x64 : https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=21C12A04-7E36-4B63-B4EF-EEDB6273CF54

IIS Media Services 4.0 : https://www.iis.net/download/SmoothStreaming

 

Expression Encoder 4.0 with\without SP1  

Expression Encoder 4.0 : https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=75402be0-c603-4998-a79c-becdd197aa79

Expression Encoder 4.0 SP1 : https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=5c3c5f97-678c-4c99-a7fc-f84f320c626f

 

Creating a Live Smooth Streaming Publishing Point on IIS Server

It is assumed that IIS Media Services is installed on top of IIS Server already:

  • 1. In IIS Manager, select the desired Web Site or virtual directory, and then double-click the Live Smooth Streaming Publishing Points icon. Such as

 

  • 2. On the Live Smooth Streaming Publishing Points page, in the Actions pane, click Add

  • 3. In the Add Publishing Point dialog box, on the Basic Settings tab, enter the following information:

 

  • File name. Enter a name for the Live Smooth Streaming publishing point definition file. In this example and throughout the rest of this walkthrough, we use the file name LiveSmoothStream. If you specify a different file name, be sure to substitute it appropriately as you follow the steps in this walkthrough.

 

  • 4. On the Advanced Settings tab, select the Start publishing point automatically upon first client request check box. This setting allows an encoder to connect to the publishing point when the broadcast starts. Connection errors might occur if you don't enable this setting.

For more information about the additional settings that you can configure on the Advanced Settings tab, see Add/Edit Dialog Box.

  • 5. If you want to deliver live streams to Apple® mobile digital devices, on the Mobile Devices tab, select the Enable output to Apple mobile digital devices check box.

Note: This option is only available on IIS Media Services 4.0 and above

Important: For more information about the requirements and publishing point configuration for Apple HTTP Live Smooth Streaming: Apple HTTP Live Streaming with IIS Media Services.

  • 6. Click OK. A newly created Live Smooth Streaming publishing point definition file named LiveSmoothStream.isml is added to the Web site root.

 

  • 7. Select and right click on created Live Smooth Streaming Publishing Point

 

  • 8. The publishing point State value changes from Idle to Starting, which means it is waiting for external data (in this case, a live stream pushed to it from an encoder).

 

  • 9. The state of publishing point changes from "Starting" to "Start" once Microsoft Expression Encoder is configure to push data to this publishing point.

 

Pushing a Stream to the Live Smooth Streaming Publishing Point

Note   Live Smooth Streaming is available only in Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro.

  • 1. Start Expression Encoder (click Start > All Programs > Microsoft Expression > Microsoft Expression Encoder 4).

 

  • 2. In the Load a new project dialog box, select Live Broadcasting Project, and then click OK.

 

 

  • 4. On the Presets tab, choose any of the preset (depending upon the bitrate requirement) with IIS Smooth Streaming in the preset name, and then click Apply.

NoteClicking the Apply button automatically updates the Output Format, Video, and Audio settings on the Encode tab.


Alternatively, you can specify your own values for the Output Format, Video, and Audio options on the Encode tab.

  • 5. On the Output tab, select the Streaming check box to activate streaming.

In the Location box, type the URL of the Live Smooth Smooth Streaming publishing point that you want to publish your live broadcast to.

URL syntax: https://ServerName/SiteName/DirectoryName/PublishingPointDefinitionFileName.isml

For the example Live Smooth Streaming publishing point that we created in the previous section, the URL would be:

https://IISMedia-Server/LiveSmoothStream.isml

Click connect to establish the connection with Publishing point.

  • 6. Click Cue to enable your source for broadcasting (a cued file source is shown in the following figure)...

...and then click Start to begin your live broadcast.

As the broadcast runs, you can monitor Statistics and Connections data in the corresponding panels.

Important : If you enabled the publishing point to stream content to Apple devices, such as iPhone® and iPadTM devices, be sure to review the encoding requirements and settings outlined in Apple HTTP Live Streaming with IIS Media Services.

Note: To be able to play the Live stream, you need to have a Silverlight client player as the media doesn't work with normal WMP client. There are Silverlight client player templates available in Expression Encoder 4 and some more available on the internet for download such as https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9752687 and Codeplex. You can also develop your Silverlight player using Smooth Streaming Client SDK.

Live_Smooth_Streaming.docx