Smooth Streaming Player Operation

LSM uses the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin to play Smooth Streaming video. This allows these videos to be played on both PC and Mac computers with intel processors. Upon playing the message online, if Silverlight has not yet been installed on your computer, you will be prompted to install the browser plugin. Click here for installation instructions.

This videos contains single language audio tracks for multiple languages. To change audio tracks, click on the 'Audio Settings' icon (a picture of a musical note) on the control bar. To close the audio settings dialog box, click on the icon again.

The Smooth Streaming Tools dialog box (picture of a bar graph) offers a set of graphical tools that allow you to see which video stream is currently being played. When a message first starts it will begin with the lowest quality video stream which in this case is the 80 Kbps layer. The video quality will gradually improve until the player reaches the highest video stream your current bandwidth will support. This is represented by the stair step movement of the red line toward the highest quality video stream (the green line) which is 726 Kbps.

How Smooth Streaming Video Works

Smooth Streaming encoding produces multiple video streams called 'layers' where each layer uses a different bit rate. LSM offers 6 video layers ranging from 80 Kbps to 726 Kbps.

When a player requests media playback, the server delivers the video stream (layer) that best matches the player's available bandwidth. Each chunk of video will be delivered as fast as the network bandwidth allows. As the bandwidth available to the player increases, the quality of the video will automatically increase. As bandwidth decreases the video quality will automatically decrease. This switching between video layers is done in a seamless manner. As a result, buffering is minimized and the best possible video quality is attained based on the current bandwidth available.