Try now-build a custom player with the Silverlight Media framework

Streaming media is already ubiquitous on the web. It seems that everyone (from news sites to social networks to next-door neighbors) is enjoying the online video experience. As the user base continues to climb, most sites need to provide high-quality video to their customers in a trustworthy, user-friendly manner, typically with high-quality bandwidth-aware video.

The core element of the online media transfer experience is the player itself. The player is the media that the user interacts with, and it can drive the user to get every element of the online experience. The player is so concerned that there is no doubt that a web-based modern media player will be much more complex to implement than the older players of a few years ago. Therefore, developers need a robust framework to build the player.

The Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) is an open source project that was released by Microsoft at the Microsoft Professional Developers conference in 2009. This project is an extensible, highly scalable Silverlight video framework that directly addresses the needs of developers and designers, providing a stable kernel for creating their own players. The core code for the Silverlight Media Framework has been optimized based on the courses learned from the NBC Olympics and Sunday Night Football Web video projects.

This article describes the basics of SMF, demonstrates how to integrate SMF into your own player project, and steps you through a simple project to create a custom player experience using SMF. I'll show you how to use SMF's logging, settings, and event handling capabilities. Finally, I'll create a player application that displays the video that is recommended for you to watch after the current video is finished.

Getting Started with SMF

Before you start, you'll need to download the framework from Codeplex (smf.codeplex.com). You will also need to download the smooth streaming player Development Kit (Iis.net/expand/smoothplayer) and refer to it in any project that uses SMF. The smooth streaming player development Kit is not an SMF, it is a completely separate enclosing source component. However, SMF can take advantage of a set of core features in the toolkit, especially the video player itself. While writing this document, the smooth streaming player Development Kit is Beta version 2.

SMF contains a large number of Microsoft. NET assemblies, as shown in Figure 1, each of which constitutes a different functional part of the entire framework.

Figure 1 Silverlight Media Framework Assembly