Question
JayCosentino on Wed, 18 Mar 2015 16:03:20
Currently streaming from our own servers using IIS, Expression Encoder to create Smooth Streams and Transform Manager for HLS. Want to consider Azure. I am not a programmer and need simple way to upload existing assets and to stream. Preferably using our existing website players.
I got a new account, storage and a CDN. I can upload video and play a mp4 file. But, this is not adaptive bitrate streaming. I assume I need a streaming unit. But, this is where I get lost.
Any examples for straight streaming or advice you can provide? Without learning programming?
Replies
Azure Media Services PM Team on Fri, 20 Mar 2015 18:23:08
Hi Jay,
You can try downloading the Azure Media Services Explorer tool from http://aka.ms/amse (associated blog post is here).
The steps you need are:
1. Account setup (can be done via Azure Portal as well)
[a] Update encoding Reserved Units, which you can do from the slider at the bottom of the Processors tab
[b] Go to the 'streaming endpoint' tab, start the "default" endpoint, and increase the Scale Units to at least 1
2. Upload MP4
3. Right-click, and encode with Media Encoder with a system preset like "H264 Adaptive Bitrate MP4 Set"
4. Once the encode completes, select the output Asset, right-click and Publish\create a locator\streaming endpoint
5. You can now right click on the asset, and use the Playback options
Cheers,
Azure Media Services PM team
Cenkd on Fri, 20 Mar 2015 18:28:33
Hi Jay,
Unfortunately you cannot use portal to upload your existing Smooth streaming assets and stream them. You need to create an empty asset and then copy your existing files and create locators for streaming or you need to upload the source files again (using code or portal), encode and publish.
If you go with uploading your existing files then you have to options to stream them. You can still keep Smooth and HLS out and use this files to stream statically or just upload Smooth files and use Dynamic Packaging feature to dynamically produce HLS output. Dynamic packaging will require at least one Streaming unit. Addition to HLS you can also get MPEG-DASH output with dynamic packaging.
I would recommend using Dynamic packaging since this will reduce the storage costs and moving forward static packager (Transform manager) will be deprecated and there is no investment on this tool from our side.
You can use either code or a Azure storage tool to upload your existing assets.
Please check these links. The articles shows how to use an existing Azure blob, but also applies to on-prem upload as well.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/jj933290.aspx
Regards,
Cenk