Smooth Streaming .ism to an HTML5 video tag

Question

I understand that the best bet when streaming a video as a source in an HTML5 tag would be .mp4. But let's say that I have a source that only outputs fragmented to an ism/manifest.

Is there any way at all, whether through other libraries or messy hacks, that I can bring this video into something rendered as a tag onscreen? The closest I have found is Walkthrough: Building Your First HTML5 Smooth Streaming Player because it allows this to be done - but I neither have Windows 8, or want to have this running a server capable of .NET. I was hoping there was something, messy or not, that I could achieve this with entirely within javascript and executable locally without a deploy.

Thanks

Answer 1

Firstly, W3C does not provide a standard for adaptive bitrate streaming, yet. So for the time being most browsers only support simple progressive download playback. Hence, there is no JS implementation of a Smooth Streaming player and Microsoft is not working on one, as far as I know.

The example you provide uses the "Microsoft Smooth Streaming Client SDK Beta 2 for Windows 8" which is a C++ library and is only available for Windows Store Apps development. It has nothing to do with browsers.

So, unfortunately this is not yet possible. Even more, I doubt that this will ever happen, because everybody is waiting for MPEG DASH to be finalized.

UPDATE. Please, notice that you always can use Siverlight application for playing SmoothStreaming. The referenced HTML5 Player framework is capable of falling back to Silverlight.

Answer 2

no luck for Microsoft Smooth Streaming, but regarding MPEG-DASH which is similar (see http://blog.johndeutscher.com/2013/06/10/mpeg-dash-preview-from-windows-azure-media-services):

"Dash.js is permissively licensed (under the BSD license) and can therefore be studied and reused by anyone seeking to provide their own DASH-AVC/264 compliant player. The goal is to make it easier for third-parties to build adaptive streaming video players."

http://msopentech.com/blog/2013/06/20/ms-open-tech-contributes-to-open-source-adaptive-streaming-video-player/

also see: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/media-source.html which is required for Dash.js