That was a mouthfull.  I've just updated my Plugin for Live Writer that allows you to insert Silverlight Streaming applications into your blog: 

... it now supports Live Spaces with the correct sizing:

I've also fixed the bug triggered by having a space at the end of your secret.  I've resubmitted the app to the Live Gallery but in the meantime the installer is attached to this post for your delectation.

In order for this not to be confused with JetFuel (which I still need to update to be compatible with Expression Encoder / Silverlight 1.0) I'm thinking of renaming this one to LighterFuel (since it is lighter-weight but still combustible).

Oh and we are nearly there with the public release of the SLS Publishing plugin for Expression Encoder:

Hopefully not too much longer now :-)

Yesterday I was flawed to receive a phone call out of the blue from the legendary Mr Scott Hanselman who has been trying to post some video up to his blog via silverlight.live.com with Jetfuel.  Turns out that the video in question (his legendary browser performance shootout) had no audio which causes a hiccup with the current public Silverlight bits (hint: you have to add an audio track with silence to work around this currently; bug will be fixed when Silverlight releases).

Anyway this prompted me to post an update on what's happening.  The Expression Media Encoder team is currently heads down hard at work on our 1.0 release.  Goodness will come from this: we have addressed a number of customer suggestions from the newsgroups as well as completing some bits and pieces that didn't make it into the public preview release.  Can't wait to share the details on these.

As a result of the push towards release, JetFuel has been a little neglected over the last few weeks; I'm planning on doing a refresh soon and will absolutely be getting the sourcecode up on codeplex.

A small enhancement was recently made to the Silverlight Streaming activation model which removes the need to update the header of a website if you want to host multiple Silverlight Streaming instances on the same page.

If you are using JetFuel to post videos to Silverlight Streaming via Live Writer, this means that you can safely check this box

and not have to worry about updating the header.  I'll be doing an update to JetFuel that removes this checkbox along with a couple of other minor fixes sometime next week.

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.