First of all, congratulations to the Windows Live Writer team for their shiny new beta 2 release.  I've been using this for a while and I have to say it really rocks as a blogging client.

To celebrate, I'm going to release the first version of JetFuel, a plug-in that automates encoding, skinning and publishing for Silverlight video experiences within Live Writer.  This started life as a sample of how to automate Expression Media Encoder and grew from there (this is the one I demoed at Mix).  Today the installer goes up and very soon, I'll be publishing the sourcecode over on Codeplex.

The motivation for doing this was.. I have this camera phone video and I want to blog it using a Silverlight video player and have that experience hosted on the recently announced Silverlight Streaming service, not my blog.  That way, I get all the CDN scalability goodness but still within the context of a blog post.

When you invoke the plugin from within Writer, it (optionally) transcodes the video of your choice to a Silverlight compliant format using Expression Media Encoder.  You can add a Creative Commons logo burnin as well as a bumper / trailer.



Pick a Silverlight player skin to warp around this video..

and then upload the whole package to Silverlight Streaming. 

This means that when you hit publish in Live Writer, the embedded video is actually being served up from a robust CDN rather than from your blog.

The transcoding and publishing all runs as a background task so you can continue to compose the words and pictures that accompany the video at the same time.

and when it's done, you end up with something like this:

Since the video is being published in Silverlight, one of the caveats is that the plugin will only work if your blog provider supports Javascript which currently rules out Wordpress and Live Spaces.

Enjoy.