Developers - get the player source code
In the previous post we learned how to create multiple encodings of our Elephants Dream video to provide playback options for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming. In this step we’ll learn how to create the Swarmcast Media Metadata files necessary for Autobahn HD to allow switching amongst the videos during playback.
Begin by downloading the Swarmcast Media Indexer tool. Within the Swarmcast Media Indexer archive you’ll find a Java application and within the directory or folder named bin the generateSwarmcastMediaMetadata.cmd and generateSwarmcastMediaMetadata command line scripts necessary to run the application on Windows and UNIX-like operating systems, respectively.
On either platform the script takes a single argument, the filepath to the FLV file to be indexed. Upon completion of the Swarmcast Media Indexer invocation a Swarmcast Media Metadata file with the same name as the input FLV and the “.smm” extension will be present on disk. Running the Swarmcast Media Indexer with the “-h” option will display full command line help.
For example, an invocation of the command: “generateSwarmcastMediaMetadata ElephantsDreamAbbr_1280x720_vp6_1400Kbps.flv” will create a Swarmcast Metadata Metadata file named “ElephantsDreamAbbr_1280x720_vp6_1400Kbps.smm“. The resulting file is much smaller than the original FLV because it contains only select information about the original file.
Once you have created a Swarmcast Media Metadata file for each of the FLV files in the Media Group upload them to your web server and make note of their corresponding URLs. It is customary to place them in the same folder on the same server as the FLV files, but it is not required. All of the files referenced above can be found in the archive at http://showcase.swarmcast.com/AutobahnAdaptiveBitrateStreamingExample.zip. So long as the Swarmcast Media Metadata files are available at known web addresses you’re ready for the next step: Using the Swarmcast Player Wizard.
