New Support for Smooth Streaming (MSS) and Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)

Adaptive Bitrate HTTP media delivery offers an efficient, scalable and cost effective alternative to traditional RTMP streaming.  Encoding.com gives you the power to decide which of the competing  technologies are right for your audience and now prepares media compliant with all 3 of the dominant HTTP segmenting technologies backed by Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft.  We are pleased to announce support for both Smooth Streaming (MSS) and Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) to our existing portfolio of Wowza SMIL streaming protocol and Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).  

Smooth Streaming is a great choice for those targeting the Microsoft Silverlight desktop client, Xbox 360, or Windows 7 devices.  Most reports gauge Silverlight plugin penetration on the desktop at about 75-80%%. All new Windows 7 phones are bundled with Silverlight, and Microsoft is making a big push to use the Xbox as the center of its living room media strategy.  Choose the "Smooth Streaming" preset from the Encoding.com client interface, watch folder or API and we will generate the single or multi-bitrate video files (ismv) along with required client (ismc) and server (ism) streaming manifest files.  Read the Smooth Streaming KB article or API docs to get started now.

Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) utilizes Adobe's packaging technology to prepare files for delivery on their Flash Media Server (or recently renamed Adobe Media Server) or any Apache web server with the Adobe HTTP module installed.  While Flash Mobile has an unknown future, Flash desktop plugin (HDS requires Flash 10.1 of later - released June 2012) is over 90% browser penetration making HDS a solid choice for adaptive bitrate delivery to the desktop.  Choose the "HTTP Dynamic Streaming" preset from the Encoding.com client interface, watch folder or "hds" from the Encoding.com API and we will generate the streaming manifest(.f4m), fragmented video files (.f4v) and the individual bitrate index files (.f4x) Read the Adobe Dynamic HTTP Streaming KB article or API docs to get started now.

Complete Dolby Audio Support
The Dolby Media Generator (DMG) is now live and integrated into the Encoding.com platform providing and greatly enhanced audio experience. DMG offers both HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 which offer especially rich audio quality at low bitrates when compared with the faac engine.  HE-AAC really shines at low bitrates, as within the 64Kbps audio-only fallback required by Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, an Apple requirment for all video over a certain length within an iOS app.  Dolby Digital Plus (EAC3) is also now available which offer fantastic multi-channel audio to video files destined for set-top box destinations connected to a multi channel audio system.

Listen to the difference in dynamic ranges between FAAC and HE-AAC at various bitrates:

Old FAAC at 56Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACC at 56Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACCv2 at 48Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACC at 120Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

Dolby Digital Plus EC3 (320Kbps) (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)
(Download only as EC3 is decoded only by compatible multi channel audio systems)

Decoding Support for the Speex and wmalossless audio codec.
Many Flash(flv) and VOIP recording solutions like (Adobe Air, Red5, and RTMPLite) record using the Speex audio codec.  Speex has held the #2 on the Enocding.com user feature request system for months yet none of the open source and commercial encoding engines we operate could decode the Speex audio codec so we compiled a special version just for the job.

API Workflow Enhancements 

• Allow video "start from" or "duration" in sub-second intervals (not just second intervals)
• Added the ability to to stop or cancel a job in progress, previously you could only do this when the job was in completed status.  
• Added the ability to restart only and individual task or only tasks that finished with a error, previously you could only restart all jobs.  
• New API notification field <notify_encoding_errors> which will only notify when a job returns an error, great for error monitoring workflows