Creating and Streaming a composite manifest file in Windows Azure

Question

I'm currenly developing an application using Windows Azure Media Services for video processing.

The scenario is: a user manages a sequence of video clips, puts them in a specific order and submits them to Media Services for processing.

I managed to stream the clips individually using they're *.ism/manifest url generated by Azure Media Services, but I want to stream them as a single clip.

I understand Azure Media Services does not provide merging/stitching capability for now, so the alternative is to use a composite streaming manifest file (*.csm) and reference the path of all the individual clips there.

The problems I run into are:

1. I could not find a single playable *.csm file on the internet as a reference

2. I used this tool http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wpapps/Smooth-Streaming-Manifest-b1c3c9f9/view/SourceCode to generate a .csm based on an existing/playable ism/manifest, but I don't know how to play it.

The ism streaming url is something like:

http://.origin.mediaservices.windows.net/dd754ce8-3de8-457f-9e57-380723794e66/clipName.ism/Manifest

and is stored in Media Services and the actual files .ism and .ismv files are stored in a storage container like asset-1707d318-0484-4f8c-8f66-890786ccb1e3

Where should I store the *.csm file in Azure? Is there any running .csm player with samples available so I can test my generated .csm?

Thanks,

Florin

Answer 1

You can use azure storage container for storing CSM file and for testing any CSM file you can use SMF health monitor http://smf.cloudapp.net/healthmonitor.