SilverLive Technical Specifications

As per the draft HTTP Live Streaming specifications, SilverLive downloads and parses .m3u8 playlists. These playlists contain URIs representing parts of a segmented MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

Generating a suitable video stream

If you would like some tips on how to encode your video, along with things to watch out for, please refer to our SilverLive encoding tips page.

Supported video codecs

The following video codecs are supported:

  • H264 (ITU-T H.264 / ISO MPEG-4 AVC) format - Annex B NAL format (i.e. start codes)
    Baseline Profile Support Only.
    Supports only progressive (non-interlaced) content.
    Supports only 4:2:0 chroma subsampling profiles.
Supported audio codecs

The following audio codecs are supported:

  • MP3 (ISO MPEG-1 Layer III) format (MP3)
  • AAC/MP4A Audio
    Supports Low Complexity (AAC-LC) decoding at full fidelity (up to 48 kHz).
    HE-AAC is currently untested - see below for details of how to test your own stream.
    Multichannel (5.1 surround) audio content is not supported.
Unsupported features:

The following features are NOT supported by SilverLive:

Varient .m3u8 playlist files (a varient playlist is one that links to other playlists)
HTTP Live Stream encryption. (we hope to add this in a future release)
Main/Advanced H264 Profiles.

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is currently incompatible with SilverLive - the implementation of MediaStreamSource on Windows Phone is different to the desktop implementation. We hope to bring SilverLive to Windows Phone 7 in the future, so do bookmark this site and come back soon to check on availability.

DRM Management

While SilverLive, as a MediaStreamSource, has no concept of DRM itself, Silverlight provides an extensive set of DRM Management classes that you can use alongside SilverLive to implement DRM and/or content output protection.

Check if Your Stream Works

To check if SilverLive will work with your streaming playlist, you can try it out online. Just enter the URI of your playlist file into the Demonstration Page.

If you're having problems getting a particular stream to play, let us know and we'll see what we can do.

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