David Sayed's Microsoft Blog

This is going to be a series of long posts. With Silverlight Streaming (silverlight.live.com) being discontinued , I thought I’d write up the detailed steps required to host videos using Windows Azure. Since many people who host videos using Silverlight...

There have been some questions in the Expression forums about product keys and apparent confusion as to which keys work with which products. The product keys are located behind the installation media (DVDs) in the Expression Studio box. This is what they...

In this post, I will describe how to use Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 to encode and publish a Silverlight video player to a Windows Azure storage account. You will need: (1) an active Windows Azure subscription , (2) an active Windows Azure storage...

I've been chatting with Scott Stanfield , CEO of Vertigo about AVCHD camcorders and we discussed how to best implement an AVCHD workflow in Expression Encoder. I recently posted a "recipe" for how to import HDV footage and encode it using Expression...

In this post, I will describe how to use Windows Live Writer to embed a Silverlight video into a blog post. You will need: (1) an active Windows Azure subscription , (2) an active Windows Azure storage service , (3) a Silverlight video player application...

In this post, I will show you how to sign-up for Windows Azure. To complete this, you will require: a physical address, a telephone number, a Windows Live ID and a valid credit card. The top-level post with a table of contents to all the related posts...

This article is now of historical interest only since the SLS service is no longer available. In this post, I will provide step-by-step instructions for retrieving videos and Silverlight applications that you had previously hosted on the Microsoft...

On Thursday at 6pm Pacific Time, you’re invited to see Alicia Keys perform live ! Watch the exclusive promo below. Our World Live (OWL) , a music marketing and broadcasting company, is partnering with Billboard.com to bring music fans a new internet concert...

In this post, I assume that you have already provisioned a Windows Azure account and have an active subscription. Step by step instructions for doing this are provided here . The top-level post with a table of contents to all the related posts is here...

Expression Media 2 SP1 is now available. If you are a Windows user and have opted to receive updates for other applications besides Windows, you should be offered the download next time Windows Update runs. If you wish to download the update manually...

Two weeks ago I opened a survey to learn more about iView and Expression Media customers, who use the product primarily for managing photos. Since a number of you took the time to offer the requested feedback, I wanted to share with you some of the survey...

Thanks go to Tim Heuer for pointing this out (and providing this workaround). In the posts on hosting a Silverlight video player on Windows Azure, Firefox users will find that the embedded player looks like this when displayed in Firefox: Two things need...

CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, has some great high definition content on their HD Beta site . Using Microsoft’s new Smooth Streaming technology , CTV is using Silverlight and Akamai’s CDN to stream high quality content with no stuttering....

Colleagues in the field highlighted a couple of nice broadcast news sites outside the United States using Silverlight. Even better, they aren’t geo-locked so you can have a play with them no matter where you are. And even better if you are French or Italian...

    If you shoot HD video using a tape-based camera, you're probably shooting HDV. Assuming you don't need to do extensive editing to your video, you can ingest these HDV tapes directly into Expression Encoder 2 using a couple of readily available...

  Expression Media 2 includes support for publishing your catalogs as Silverlight galleries. Felix Andrew, who is the architect for Expression Media, recently wrote a nice article on how to customize one of the samples that is shipped with Expression...

Updated 10/14/2009: Player is now live on the front page of the France 24 website. Changed the link to the new player, which has removed some of the interactive features, no doubt to return later. France 24, the French 24 hour news channel, has introduced...

We're doing more and more video work in my team, the latest being some of the videos used for our Expression 3/Silverlight 3 launch in San Francisco last week. You'll be able to see some of these on www.seethelight.com soon. Because one of the standout...

Ever wondered how Netflix encodes their video material for their streaming service? This blog post from their chief product office, Neil Hunt, goes into some considerable detail.

I have a love/hate relationship with AVCHD . My little Canon HG10 is a hard-drive AVCHD high-definition camcorder. It is small, takes beautiful video, has a nice lens and generally does pretty much everything you could want from a consumer-grade device...

CDNetworks, a Korea-based CDN has introduced support for Smooth Streaming and it looks great! You can check it out for yourself by visiting http://www.nextsmooth.com . What’s particularly nice is the demo player shown above. You can see high-quality...

Expression Encoder Express is a free version of Expression Encoder. If you have the full version and want to force Express mode (for testing purposes perhaps), there are two ways to do so: Registry Key Method [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft...

A nice demo of SD content using Smooth Streaming: http://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/hd/raitvhd.html?v=1

Today, we unveiled an exciting technology demo called DeepZoomPix. It enables you to experience a rich way of interacting with large numbers of high resolution photos. The best part is that you can use your own photos either by direct upload, Facebook...

MSN Brazil is using DeepZoomPix on their site show off pictures from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The DeepZoomPix photo exploration experience engages site visitors, which means they’ll spend longer on the site, which is boon to any site that uses advertising...