Azure Media Services Overview And Playing Media

Azure media services help you to build custom media workflows in the cloud. In Azure Media Services it is an end-to-end solution that lets you deliver audio and video virtually in any device anywhere. The Service offers end-to-end workflow which is very highly scalable in coding, packaging, storing and distribution of media content to a wide range of devices including TV, PC, and mobile devices.

Now let’s start with Azure Media Services:

Sign in to Azure.

Click on AppServices, Media Service, then Quick Create.

Give the name to your Azure Media Service, select the region/location and we need a new storage account where our media will be saved.

Give Storage Account Name, and click on to CREATE MEDIA SERVICE.

A new Azure Media Service will be created. Click on to it.

In this interface as you can see there are number of tabs.

Let’s start with content protection tab, in content protection you can:

• To protect your premium video content, Azure media is introducing a content protection offering that features both static and dynamic encryption for a range of multi-DRM (PlayReady and Wide vine).
  
• Secure your content from cloud upload to playback.
• You can secure playback with client SDKs for all your devices.
• Simplifies key Management and helps to maintain future proof content with dynamic Encryption.

Now the content tab is linked to the Azure Storage that would store the media files that we upload. It is actually an Azure Blob Storage that would store the input files that I need to encode in packaged. It will also store the output files that would be result of encoding and packaging.

In the JOBS tab we can see all the jobs that are currently in progress in Azure Media Services. So if I have encoding jobs that’s currently in progress so we can monitor that job over here.

Streaming Endpoint represents a streaming service that can deliver content directly to a client player application, or to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for further distribution. Streaming Endpoints behave like a server and these are responsible to stream your contents.

Looks like in figure there is a default streaming endpoint which cannot be deleted.

Click on it to open its other settings.

We can manage our scale of point of the receiver end in the media. We can manage the streaming capacity with the streaming units. For increasing streaming units move the reserved capacity slider.

We can configure some settings for the actual streaming like including the CDN settings and IP Addresses that are allowed.

Channel entity represents the pipeline for processing live streaming content. A channel receives live input streams.

In the ENCODING tab we can see some settings for Azure media encoder and we can treat that setting in here. In this you also have a reserved category available for encoding in units of 200 megabits per second and this is recommended for production use.

Let’s go back into content tab to upload a media.

Click on to Upload button to upload a media.

In the Upload Content choose the file from local computer; make sure file should not be more than 200 MB.

It will generate a content name for your media which show that the file is in MP4 format.

Click on to next for further.

You can see the file is uploaded. It would upload fairly quick so that file is not published yet.

Now the content is uploaded, now it’s time to encode, so select the file and click on to “PROCESS” in the bottom of the window.

Now select a processor according to your file format.

In Encode Configuration, there will a wide range of encoding and encode this file into H264 Single Bitrate 720P.

It takes Output Content name by default.

Click on to check to process it.

So the encoding job is being created for this particular file in the following screenshot, which is not published yet.

You can monitor its progress in the JOBS tab, so click on to Jobs to see its monitoring. You can monitor the status of your encoding task as green color.

Go back into the Content, you would see the new file will be created and is not published.

Select the file and just click on to PUBLISH button to publish it.

It will look up for confirmation, click on to yes.

After clicking on to Publish, we will get the publish URL generated by the Azure Media Services. Click to copy the URL and paste into a browser tab. This publish URL is accessible on Internet.

You can see the video media player is running on to browser, which we just encoded.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Stay tuned with me for more on Azure and other Microsoft technologies.

Thanks.

Connect (“Nitin Pandit”);

Read more articles on Azure:

• Getting Started With Microsoft Azure
• Get Started With iOS App Using Azure Mobile Services