Building Custom Players with the Silverlight Media Framework

Streaming media has become ubiquitous on the Web. It seems like everyone—from news sites to social networks to your next-door neighbor—is involved in the online video experience. Due to this surge in popularity, most sites want to present high-quality video—and often high-quality bandwidth-aware video—to their consumers in a reliable and user-friendly manner.

A key element in the online media delivery experience is the player itself. The player is what the customer interacts with, and it drives every element of the user’s online experience. With so much attention centered on the player, it’s no surprise that modern, Web-based media players have become a great deal more complicated to implement than they were even a couple years ago. As a result, developers need a robust framework on which they can build their players.

The Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) is an open source project that was released by Microsoft at the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. It is an extensible and highly scalable Silverlight video framework that directly answers the need for a stable core upon which developers and designers can create their own players. The code at the center of the Silverlight Media Framework has been refined based on lessons learned from the NBC Olympics and Sunday Night Football Web video projects.

This article will explain the basic elements of SMF, demonstrate how you can integrate SMF into your own player projects and walk you through a simple project that uses SMF to create a custom player experience. I’ll show you how to use the logging, settings, and event-handling features of SMF. Finally, I’ll create a player application that displays suggested videos for further viewing when the current video ends.

Getting Started with SMF
To get started, the first thing you’ll want to do is download the framework from Codeplex (smf.codeplex.com). You also need to download the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit (iis.net/expand/smoothplayer) and reference it in any projects using SMF. The Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit is not part of SMF—it’s a completely separate, closed-source component. However, SMF leverages a core set of functionality from the kit, in particular the video player itself. As of the writing of this article, the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit is in beta 2.

Read more: MSDN Magazine

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous