Hi,
In this topic I am trying to clarify the current situation with available ready to use Silverlight video players with smoothstreaming support and invite the community to share their experience.
So, for Flash we have a number of open source solutions like JW Player, Flowplayer, Open Video Player, Open Source Video Framework and so on. They are ideal for most purposes, that we’re having, whether live or on-demand streaming, playlists, advertising and so on.
Few days ago I tried to find something similar for Silverlight as alternative to player ‘IIS_Smooth_Streaming_Player_Development_Kit_1.0_Beta_2.exe’ mentioned in all tutorials in this forum.
I wanted to get something to work out of the box with live and ondemand smooth streaming with Wowza Media Server 2.
And I failed on this, because I did not find anything what will work out of the box without additional development, so I would like to share my experience, that is my 2 cents on this greater topic.
Quick search on the google give me some links to the existing Silverlight video player projects. They are:
IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit v1.0 Beta2
The IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit allows you to build rich Smooth Streaming experiences for both on-demand and live Smooth Streaming.
Diagnosis: This package has prebuilt sample video player, but it has one annoying feature, the “Smooth streaming tools” debuging panel as well as extra buttons, which I don’t need to have in my live webcast, all of that prevent using this player outside of our labs.
Open Video Player (OVP) is an initiative encompassing the use of open standards, best practices, and established development methodologies in the development of media player applications. Currently this project provides a code base that can be used to solve common problems as part of building advanced, scalable, and robust web-based media player applications in Flash and Silverlight.
Diagnosis: This is realy great project and it has Silverlight video player, but I can not get it work with Wowza Media Server despite the declared support of smooth streaming.
The JW Player for Silverlight is a simple, flexible player for displaying Windows Media video, audio and (live) streams on your website. While not as widely installed nor feature-rich as Flash, Silverlight is excellent for publishers who have content encoded in WMV or WMA.
Diagnosis: I am sure this player will be one of the best players, like one for Flash, but in the future. Now it do not supports smoothstreaming.
A Silverlight 2 video player built by Joel Neubeck using the standard MediaElement and a few of the new system controls (ToggleButon, Slider and Button). The goal was to build a re-sizable video player using no custom user controls, but instead leveraging controls styles and templates.
Diagnosis: This is frozen project not fitting to our requirements by definition because it do not support smoothstreaming.
Did not find any description about this project, licensing, just the player and instruction to it.
Diagnosis: This player did not work with smoothstreaming for me
Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework
Microsoft’s open source Silverlight Media Framework enables developers to quickly deploy a robust, scalable, customizable media player for IIS Smooth Streaming delivery. The SMF builds on the core functionality of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit.
Diagnosis: This is the last but not least project in my list, a great framework with a lot of features in mind, but it is lack of prebuilt ready to use customizable player. So, to use it you need to setup Silverlight development environment, make some code modifications (for example to setup streaming URL to your own media server) and compile it. Only this make SMF unacceptable to unexpirienced in Silverlight peoples and it enters them into nightmare.
So, I am experienced developer with strong background in J2EE, Flex and C++, worked with MSVS in the past, spent on this about eight hours to make it work as I want.
But anyway, this is my choice at this moment.
Too many words to read 
but I hope it will be helpfull for someone and as I already mentioned above, I am welcome all folks to correct me if I made a mistakes, to complement this list and to share their experience on that.
P.S.
Also I am failed to get work the one from the WMS 2 examples in ‘examples/SimpleVideoStreaming/clientSilverlight’.
So, I would like to ask WowzaMedia team about it.
this issue is closed by Charlie reply:
It must be copied and run from a web server. It can be any web server but it cannot be run just by opening the HTML file directly.
