Dan Gehred CTO of Hypershow.com shows off their Silverlight 4 enhanced movie player.. enabling digital copies of movies to be included on physical discs (eg bluray) and then installed and played on a PC or Mac.

You can go fullscreen by hovering and clicking

Interested and, I have to admit, somewhat surprised to see that the Expression Encoder 3 announcement blog post was the fifth most popular post on the Silverlight Team blog in 2009

http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/what-you-wanted-to-know-top-ldquo-how-to-rdquo-posts-of-2009/

*Grin* So video encoding is Cool and not just for nerds, right?

A few weeks ago I sat down with David Sayed and recorded a podcast about Expression Encoder 3 for the Silverlight blog.  You can get it here.

To me this was the coolest Silverlight 4 demo from the PDC09 keynote… An out-out-browser full trust Facebook application written in Silverlight 4 with fluid, modern UI, access to local OS and desktop resources eg USB camera, integration with Outlook and the ability to freely mix Silverlight / HTML / Flash in the same UI.  Thanks to Johnny Allwright for giving me a quick demo:

(The Azure CDN CTP is having intermittent problems so I’m posting both the CDN-enabled and origin copies of the video)

Azure CDN link:

My good friend Mr Knowlton has been bugging me to write this post for a while so I dedicated this to Chris.

Let’s say I have a video (like the one of Chopper tubing at Snoqualmie Summit the other weekend) that I shot on my Canon SD880 that I want to

• Add a simple title and transcode to a Silverlight compatible format
• wrap in a nice Silverlight 2 player template
• publish it to the 10GB of free geo-scalable storage up on Silverlight Streaming
• and finally insert it in a blog post.

The first thing I need to do is install the correct components:

1. get the Expression Encoder trial:
   Note that even though this is called a trial, when it expires you still get to use basic functionality since the trial runs in Express mode rather than completely timing out.
2. install Expression Encoder 2 SP1:
3. install the new SLS publishing plugin that works with the above:
4. If you want to publish the video to a blog, make sure you have the latest Windows Live Essentials installed: http://download.live.com
   and get the LiveWriter plugin from here:

Phew!

OK so first off lets launch Encoder and import our video.  I already have Quicktime installed since the SD880 creates H.264 content inside of MOV wrappers.

The only encoding setting I’m going to change is to pick the Web Server Broadband preset.

I can fill in some metadata to describe the video if I like:

I can design a simple animated title in Blend..

and use it as a XAML leader file in the Enhance Tab:

Next I want to pick the Silverlight template that I want to use.  I’m going to choose Black Glass which is a Silverlight 2 template that has some spiffy animated player controls:

Because I don’t want the video to start when the page loads, I first choose a thumbnail for the poster frame:

then I tell the Silverlight player not to autostart:

Now time to encode.. that didn’t take long.

OK so now we’re going to publish this bad boy up to Silverlight Streaming.  If you don’t have an account, go up to Silverlight Streaming and create one.

Once you do have one, you need the account ID and Key:

Just plug those into the publish palette:

and after a short wait you get both a code snippet and a live preview from Silverlight streaming

At this point you can take the code snippet and paste it anywhere that accepts iFrames or, if you are using Live Writer and you installed the Silverlight Streaming plugin:

you can easily insert you’re app:

and now here is the result:

And no YouTube in sight.. only an Inner Tube :-) Go Chopper!

Thanks Chris!