David Sayed's Microsoft Blog

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...

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...

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 love Netflix and I love their Watch Instantly feature, which enabled me to discover and catch up with Heroes, re(discover) classics and watch some admittedly dubious films that I would have never otherwise bothered with. Mostly, I use the feature on...

Geotate is a very interesting British company who were showing their automatic geotagging technology at Photokina. Now there are a number of geotagging products out there, some of which rely on GPS and some like EyeFi that refer to surrounding WiFi networks...

  At Photokina, we were lucky enough to have a local Expression Media fan who spent pretty much the entire week of his own time demoing Expression Media at our booth. Wolfgang works for Microsoft in Germany, but does not actually work on the product...

I spent some time with the Mac Office guys at Photokina who were showing the Special Media Edition version of the product, which includes Expression Media. Below is a video that shows Mac users some of the cool things they can do when they use Office...

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...

Yesterday was the first day of Photokina. I spent much of the day on the Microsoft stand talking to people about Expression Media. I did get a chance to walk around a little and stopped by the Canon stand over in Hall 3. Most of the interest was around...

Some of you know what goes into making a trade show happen. For those who don't, the day before the show opens can be crazy: making sure that everything works while the booth is getting built around you. Here are some behind the scenes photos.

This week, I'm at Photokina with a large number of Microsoft people. If you're around, come and see us in Hall 0.41 Stand H049 G031. We have lots of interesting things being shown including Expression Media 2 Service Pack 1 , Photosynth , Microsoft...

Some of the Expression Media team will be in the UK the week of September 15th just before Photokina . I’ll be there to attend REMIX 08 in Brighton and am thinking about organising an informal meet up for iView and Expression Media users. I f...

Expression Media will be represented at Photokina in Cologne, Germany from September 23rd to 28th. We’ll be there together with the Rich Media Group . If you’re attending, stop by Hall 04.1 Stand H049 G031 and say hello. Also, let me know if you have...

Some of the Expression Media team did an impromptu lunch session at the Microsoft ProPhoto Summit yesterday. We had about 30 people come in throughout our 90 minute slot during lunch. Kevin Bier, our illustrious Product Unit Manager, MCed the whole thing...

Ziv Gilat 's Eye-Fi demo at the ProPhoto Summit today was awesome. For those who don't know, Eye-Fi is a 2GB SD card that has built-in WiFi. When I first saw it at MacWorld in January, it simply used your home WiFi network to upload pictures you shot...

Here's a hot new feature that will enhance how we do cuts editing in Expression Encoder. We're looking at implementing this in a future version of Expression Encoder - check out the video! :) Joking aside, this video shows the origin of the term "cuts...

  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...

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...

Now that Expression Encoder 2 has been released, the team is hard at work on the next version of the product. We want to be as responsive to community feedback as possible, and would like to set up a panel of customers with whom we can have ongoing conversations...

Having posted a method for compressing AVCHD directly in Expression Encoder 2 , I thought I would see how footage from the various AVCHD camcorders fared. So it was off to the local electronics retailer armed with an SDHC memory card an a Memory Stick...

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...

OK, so it wasn't secret and it wasn't a ball either but I couldn't resist the reference. Ben Waggoner hosted a party for video compressionists at NAB this year and I dragged myself there. I was feeling worse for wear not because of over-indulgences in...

Expression Media 2 features support for creating Silverlight web galleries, which means interactive galleries rather than plain, boring, static HTML, which after all is so 1999. Apart from being animated, fluid and cool, Silverlight galleries are useful...

Did you know that students can get Expression products for free? As part of Microsoft's family of developer tools, all Expression products are available at no charge to eligible students through DreamSpark. For more information on DreamSpark together...

    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...