First Look: Microsoft IIS Media Services 4
Microsoft sees Transform Manager working in harmony with EE 4 Pro, in three areas: converting existing content library, constant ingest/ transcode and converting fragmented MP4 files to Apple HTTP Live for on-demand content.
The latter is an area that is of great interest. According to Microsoft, dropping an existing Smooth Streaming presentations into a watch folder can be automated to transmux multiple Smooth streams to the MPEG-2 TS format, while at the same time converting the Smooth stream manifest to an .m3u8 playlist.
In the area of constant ingest/transcode, Microsoft sees a model in which user-generated content can be constantly transcoded to applicable playback formats. The alpha release of Transform Manager can handle queues of up to one hundred files per minute. Encoding to the Smooth Streaming file format via an Expression Encoder 4 task, or through extensible API connections, Transform Manager would handle all the transcoding at the server level, eliminating the need for manual intervention to transcode user-generated content.
The final area that Transform Manager may surpass EE 4 Pro's transcoding capabilities is in the area of estimates. EE 4 Pro has a slider bar that allows the novice to choose an arbitrary quality setting-based on a 100 per cent scale-versus choosing a constrained / unconstrained transcode that requires a knowledge of bitrates for particular resolutions. The reason that I think Transform Manager may be a better option is that my tests with the Quality slider in EE 4 Pro showed that quality is not necessarily linear.
For instance, using a 171 MB HDV M2T file (at the 1440x1080 at which HDV records) to output a file to 1920x1080 output, a slider setting of 95 per cent yielded a file that was 191 MB, or more than 20 MB higher than the original file. Dialing back the quality to 50 per cent yielded a file that was less than one-third the size, rather than one-half the size, clocking in at 69 MB (or 10 Mbps vs the 25 Mbps that HDV records to tape).
Still, in the end, it may be that both EE 4 Pro and Transform Manager complement one another, with EE 4 Pro being the test bed in which one-off files are tested to tweak a particular transcoding setting. Once the parameters are down pat, the profile can be translated in to a Transform Manager profile, and the server-side transcoding can perform the heavy lifting of multiple file transcodes.
So what's the verdict of the beta version of IIS Media Services 4? Microsoft has made great strides towards a codec- and player-agnostic approach to streaming, especially when it comes to adaptive bitrate output to a wide variety of devices, including those iOS devices from Apple, including the iPad and iPhone. I'm comfortable recommending a closer look at IIS Media Services 4 beta as-is for testing purposes, and I look forward to a more detailed review of Transform Manager and several other features, once IIS Media Services 4 is officially released.