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Source: Silverlight Team Blog

The open source Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) enables developers to quickly deploy a robust, scalable, customizable player for IIS Smooth Streaming delivery. The SMF builds on the core functionality of the Smooth Streaming Client and adds a large number of additional features, including an extensibility API that allows developers to create plugins for the framework.

If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a Silverlight framework encapsulating the best practices for media playback for Silverlight applications.  It is both a framework and, in v2, they also provided compiled simple player XAPs that you can just drop in HTML.  If you are building apps, you’ll want to take a look at the framework in more detail, but if you want a solid media player experience grab the players too.

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.

Tim also shows how he extended the SMF implementation and created a player to suit his specific needs (including not using DVR, among other features). He cracks the code open and shows how he extended the SMF to add custom features so the video does not start until it has a chance to buffer (about 3 seconds). Tim also added the ability to pass a parameter to the SMF player to indicate if it should automatically load the video or if the video should use smooth streaming.

Over the last year, a rather large part of my development work has included working with IIS Smooth Streaming, especially in relation to Silverlight. When I started looking at Smooth Streaming, about a year ago, there were not many places around the web where you could find Smooth streaming development related resources. And although the pictures is somewhat better today, there’s still not a whole lot of good material around, so I thought I’d try and putt together some posts sharing my experiences with Smooth Streaming development. 

You see, the SMF itself is essentially a set of controls…but not an ‘app’ itself that you can just consume the binary.  What I did was basically create a new Silverlight application myself with one simple element: Player.  This way I could implement what I needed for my use.  The first thing I wanted was to have a simple XAP that I’d be able to load parameters in…very much like we did for SL Video Player on codeplex.  To make essentially the player have a flexible use model.  I could host the player anywhere and just feed it media to play.

In this short post Corey Schuman talk about the SimpleEventArgs class in Silverlight and why you should use it.

Have you ever been in a scenario where you just want to pass an object through an event the EventArgs without having to create custom EventArgs for each type of event?  SimpleEventArgs solves this by using generics, and asks only for the class.  This one class has saved me countless amounts of time by not having to code up custom EventArgs.