Setting up a Live Smooth Streaming broadcast

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Creating and playing back a successful Live Smooth Streaming broadcast in Microsoft Expression Encoder requires some specific configurations. Before you begin, make sure that the destination server has Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the Smooth Streaming extension for IIS7, and Microsoft Silverlight.

You should also make sure that the server that you plan to have stream the live broadcast is properly prepared. For more information about preparing the server, see Prepare a server for a Live Smooth Streaming broadcast.

The following steps outline a general workflow, with details only on the specific tasks that you need to create Live Smooth Streaming output. For an overview of creating a live broadcast, see Create a Live Broadcasting session.

To create a Live Smooth Streaming broadcast

  1. Cue your live and file-based sources.

  2. In the Encode panel, set your Output Format to IIS Smooth Streaming. This is the only output format that is compatible with Live Smooth Streaming.

  3. Set your Video and Audio options. Alternatively, you can choose a Silverlight preset. To do this, in the Preset panel, expand the Encoding for Silverlight list, and then expand the IIS Live Smooth Streaming list. Choose from one of the presets in the list.

  4. On the Output panel, click Streaming to activate streaming.

  5. Your only choice for publishing your content is to use the Publishing Point option. It should be selected by default. If it isn't selected, select it.

  6. In the Location box, type the name of the server running IIS that you want to publish your live broadcast to. The syntax may resemble the following:

    http://[name of server].com/PublishPointName/Point.isml

    Click Connect to test the server connections.

  7. To set the EventID, below the Connect button, click Show advanced propertiesFf723887.2f8a79a9-68d2-4878-8b75-c76ceb921b3b(en-us,Expression.40).png. If you want to provide a unique EventID, then enter it in the EventID box. If you want Expression Encoder to provide an ID, then click Generate to use the current system date and time as the EventID. If you do not specify a unique ID for the broadcast, then, because of the caching between the server and the playback client, the playback client may actually play that cached or archived data from a previous connection to the publish point. Select Automatically update on restart to automatically create a new event ID each time you restart your current broadcast. The updated ID will consist of the system date and time.

  8. If you want to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) to your content, select Digital Rights Management. Type the License URL (the server that will supply the license), the Key ID, and specify a Key (provided for you by the license provider). In the adjacent menu, choose whether the key is a Seed or Content key.

    For information about setting DRM options, see Set DRM options.

    Note that the license provided for a Live Smooth Streaming session is non-persistent, meaning that as soon as the user closes the client application being used to view your content, the license expires.

  9. Begin your live broadcast.

  10. As you broadcast, you can monitor the statistics and the connection information in the corresponding panels. For more information about these panels, see Using the Connections panel and Using the Statistics panel.

See also

Tasks

Set Audio options
Set File Sources
Set H.264 options
Set Live Sources
Set Output formats
Set Video options
Set VC-1 options

Concepts

About Live Smooth Streaming

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