Dean Rowe's WebLog

Editing files with Encoder V3

Dean Rowe — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:34:32 GMT

I’d written a previous post about editing files with Encoder v2 in the SDK however in V3 we changed things a little bit to support adding multiple files to a single timeline. In the case where you want to edit bits out of a single file you now need to go through the Source object.

Here’s some sample code that does this which should hopefully be self-explanatory.

// Create a media item and get a pointer to the inital source.
MediaItem item = new MediaItem(@"c:\users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos\Wildlife.wmv");
Source source = item.Sources[0];

// Change the first clip so that instead of spanning the entire file
// I'm just going to encode the bit from 5 to 10 seconds.
source.Clips[0].StartTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 5);
source.Clips[0].EndTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 10);

// Also add the bit from 20 to 30 seconds from the original file.
TimeSpan secondClipStart = new TimeSpan(0,0,20);
TimeSpan secondClipEnd = new TimeSpan(0,0,30);
source.Clips.Add(new Clip(secondClipStart, secondClipEnd));

Expression Encoder 3 Visual Basic Samples

Dean Rowe — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:59:11 GMT

We shipped Expression Encoder 3 with a bunch of samples that demonstrated various aspects of the Expression Encoder 3 SDK. Some of them were shipped as C# only. Thanks to some good folks in Visual Studio these are now available in Visual Basic in the following CodePlex project.

Expression Encoder 3 Visual Basic Samples

You can download them as one zip file by clicking on the Source Code tab and then clicking the Download tab on the right. If you have any problems let me know.

What’s New in the Expression Encoder 3 SDK?

Dean Rowe — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:55:46 GMT

Just posted a little article talking about the Expression Encoder 3 SDK over on the Expression Encoder team blog.

Link

Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 is now available for download

Dean Rowe — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:57:20 GMT

Check out the details on the Expression Encoder blog. Download it and tell us what you think.

Link

Coming Soon: Expression Encoder 3

Dean Rowe — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:38:28 GMT

James has just updated the Expression Encoder blog with details of Expression Encoder 3. The product that has been keeping us busy for a while now. Once it’s out I’ll try to post a little bit more than I have in the past :-)

Link

Editing files with Encoder

Dean Rowe — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:03:57 GMT

In Encoder V2 we added the ability to edit multiple sections out of a video/audio file and this can also be accomplished with the Expression Encoder SDK. MediaItem has a property called SourceClips which contains the list of clips for that media item. When you create a MediaItem it starts with one clip that encompasses the entire duration of the source. Each clip is represented by the SourceClip class and that contains two properties StartTime and EndTime. These properties indicate the times within the source file that the clip represents. For example, if I wanted to change it so that I only encoded the first 15 seconds of the file I could do something like the following.

MediaItem item = new MediaItem(@"C:\myvideo.wmv");
item.SourceClips[0].EndTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 15);

If I wanted to include the time from 0-15 seconds and from 30-45 seconds of the file I could add the following lines.

TimeSpan timeStart = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30);
TimeSpan timeEnd = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 45);
item.SourceClips.Add(new SourceClip(timeStart, timeEnd));

You can keep added SourceClip’s for as many sections of the source that you wish to add before calling the Encode method.

Metadata

Dean Rowe — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:56:57 GMT

When encoding files using the Expression Encoder SDK, you may find there are times when you want to examine the current metadata and/or change the metadata on the file you’re creating. Let’s say you want to go through all the metadata items on an item, you can do something like this.

MediaItem mediaItem = new MediaItem(@"C:\myvideo.wmv");
int metadataCount = 0;
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> pair in mediaItem.Metadata)
{
    Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + "-" + pair.Value);
}

More frequently you’ll probably want to specify certain metadata before encoding the file. You can do this by doing something like the following before calling the Job’s Encode method

mediaItem.Metadata[MetadataNames.Title] = "My Home Movies";
mediaItem.Metadata[MetadataNames.Author] = "Dean Rowe";

These are using the predefined metadata names that we’ve specified. If you want to specify your own custom metadata you can simply do something like

mediaItem.Metadata["Fred"] = "Foo";

Expression Encoder 2 SDK Updated for Service Pack 1

Dean Rowe — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:29:14 GMT

I’ve just uploaded a post to the Expression Encoder team blog that talks about the new updates to the Expression Encoder 2 SDK that we’ve just released for Service Pack 1. Go ahead and try it out and let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Link

Bingo

Dean Rowe — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:48:00 GMT

The other day my wife had volunteered to help out with the Halloween festivities at my son’s school. As part of this, she wanted to organize a game of bingo for the kids. I promised to help and went online to search for some halloween bingo cards that could be generated or printed out. Unfortunately my searches weren’t fruitful. I found ones with numbers or words, but nothing that allowed me to uses images – which I thought would make it more fun for the young kids.

I thought about using Excel to generate the cards or maybe Word but that didn’t look to be as straightforward as I ‘d hope it might be. Then I thought “What about writing a quick WFP app?”. I hadn’t tried printing from WPF first, so I knocked up a quick app to try that out. Once that proved straightforward I just had to write some simple XAML to layout the card, get some halloween clipart from office online and write a little code to load and randomize the images.

So here’s what I ended up with. Each time you run it the app you get a “random” card and every time you click “Print” a new card is generated so you can just keep printing until you have enough cards.

The kids loved it. We gave a few prizes for the kids that got a line first and then we let the kids keeping playing until everybody had filled their card. Note that I deliberately chose to include every image on every card, so everybody filled out their card and shouted “house” at the same time. Of course it would be quite easy to change this behaviour.

If you ever want to do something like this yourself, just launch Visual Studio and create a new WPF application. Here’s what my window1.xaml looked like.

<Window
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    x:Class="UntitledProject4.Window1"
    x:Name="Window"
    Title="Bingo"
    Width="850" Height="900">

    <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <Border x:Name="BingoCard" Margin="50,50,0,0" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" BorderBrush="#FF000000" BorderThickness="5,5,5,5">
            <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding ElementName=Window, Path=Images}" >
                <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
                    <ItemsPanelTemplate>
                        <WrapPanel />
                    </ItemsPanelTemplate>
                </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
                <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <Border Width="142" Height="142" BorderBrush="#FF000000" BorderThickness="5,5,5,5">
                            <Image Width="Auto" Height="Auto" Source="{Binding Path=FileName}" Margin="10,10,10,10"/>
                        </Border>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
            </ItemsControl>
        </Border>
        <Button HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="20,20,0,44" Width="97" Height="30" Content="Print" Click="OnPrint" IsDefault="True"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Window>

and here’s the corresponding C# file.

using System;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;

namespace UntitledProject4
{
    public class ImageData
    {
        public ImageData(string fileName)
        {
            this.FileName = fileName;
        }

        public string FileName { get; set; }    
    }

    public partial class Window1
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The list of images that are databound to.
        /// </summary>
        private ObservableCollection<ImageData> m_images = new ObservableCollection<ImageData>();
        
        /// <summary>
        /// The print dialog. We store it as a member variable so any printer settings are preserved
        /// across multiple prints.
        /// </summary>
        private PrintDialog m_prtDlg = new PrintDialog();

        /// <summary>
        /// Initialize a instance of the Window1 class, that holds a bingo card.
        /// </summary>
        public Window1()
        {
            // Load the images - in this case I'm just loading them from c:\temp\halloween
            for (int i = 1; i <= 25; i++)
            {
                m_images.Add(new ImageData(@"C:\temp\halloween\" + i.ToString() + ".bmp"));
            }

            // Randomize them.
            this.RandomizeImages();

            this.InitializeComponent();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the collection of images to use for the bingo card.
        /// </summary>
        public ObservableCollection<ImageData> Images
        {
            get
            {
                return m_images;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Called to print the bingo card. The images are randomized after every print.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="sender">The sender of the event.</param>
        /// <param name="e">The event arguments</param>
        private void OnPrint(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            if (m_prtDlg.ShowDialog() == true)
            {
                m_prtDlg.PrintVisual(this.BingoCard, "Bingo");
            }

            RandomizeImages();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Randomly shuffle the images
        /// </summary>
        private void RandomizeImages()
        {
            Random random = new Random();
            int imagesCount = m_images.Count;
            for (int i = 0; i < imagesCount; i++)
            {
                int randomIndex = random.Next(0, imagesCount);
                ImageData imageData = m_images[randomIndex];
                m_images[randomIndex] = m_images[i];
                m_images[i] = imageData;
            }
        }
    }
}

Hopefully the code should be self explanatory.

Expression Encoder 2 SP1 SDK

Dean Rowe — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:06:15 GMT

As you may have heard Expression Encoder 2 SP1 is now available to download. We've been putting the final touches to the updated SDK which will included an updated help file, intellisense files and some samples in C# and now also in Visual Basic. The SDK should be released soon.

Expression Encoder 2 SP1

Dean Rowe — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:46:37 GMT

If you’ve been wondering what we’ve been doing for last few months we’ve now announced Expression Encoder SP1 over on the Expression Encoder team blog. You’ll find quite a few new features and some nice bug fixes and this will be a free upgrade to to Expression Encoder 2.

Expression Encoder and VB.NET

Dean Rowe — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:49:31 GMT

As James recently posted on the Expression Encoder team blog, we’ve just released an update to Expression Encoder 2 so that if you wish to use our object model from Visual Basic.NET you can now do that.

Download link

Expression Encoder 2 SDK released

Dean Rowe — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:24:04 GMT

We released the Encoder SDK today. You can download it from the following location.

Microsoft® Expression® Encoder 2 SDK

Once installed, it will create a Start Menu shortcut under Microsoft Expression which opens an explorer window to the SDK directory.

The SDK installs a couple of XML files which enable intellisense comments within Visual Studio.

There is a Docs folder which contains the help file along with a PNG of the object hierarchy which can be printed if desired.

You'll also see a Samples directory which contain the actual samples. If you're running Vista and you want to build the samples directly from this location, remember that you'll probably need to run Visual Studio elevated.

The help file contains an introduction, details on the samples, the API reference and a few other bits and pieces.

We hope you find this useful, and please send us your feedback.

Intellisense and Help file for Expression Encoder 2 Object Model

Dean Rowe — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:59:18 GMT

Just posted a link to the Intellisense and Help files for the object model to the Expression Encoder Team blog.

Head over, try them out and let us know what you think.

Thanks

Link

Expression Encoder 2 is released

Dean Rowe — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:38:15 GMT

Expression Encoder 2 is now available. Click on the image to go to the Expression Encoder page where you will find a "Try Now" link to download the trial. We're planning to have more details of the new features up on the Expression Encoder Team blog soon. I'm also working on getting together a prelimary help file for the SDK object model and some XML files that will enable Intellisense comments within Visual Studio. Expect those soon...

Changing the output profile

Dean Rowe — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:11:33 GMT

Once you've created a MediaItem, you're probably going to want to specify which video and/or audio profile you want to encode it with. There are a number of ways to obtain a video and audio profile. If you have your own PRX file that you wish to use, you can load it with code something like this

VideoProfile videoProfile;
AudioProfile audioProfile;
LocalProfiles.LoadProfileFromFile(@"C:\MyProfile.prx", out videoProfile, out audioProfile);

Once you have the profile loaded you can then set it on the MediaItem like so

mediaItem.VideoProfile = videoProfile;
mediaItem.AudioProfile = audioProfile;

If you want to use one of the built-in profiles you can obtain it with code something like this by just searching for the name of the profile.

VideoProfile videoProfile = VideoProfile.FindProfile("Hardware Device - zune");

This does have the disadvantage that the code isn't going to work on a non English version of Expression Encoder as the string will be localized into a different language. So in the RTM version of Expression Encoder we will include a static list of Video and Audio Profiles that match the built-in profiles we supply, so you'll be able to write the code a little easier like this

// Code from the future
mediaItem.VideoProfile = VideoProfiles.HardwareDeviceZune;

Once you've set the profile you may want to tweak it further by changing some of the individual parameters. You can do this with code like the following

// Funky code alert
mediaItem.VideoProfile = (VideoProfile)mediaItem.VideoProfile.Clone();

// Set the video bitrate and change the dimensions of the output video
mediaItem.VideoProfile.Bitrate = 64000;
mediaItem.VideoProfile.Height = 80;
mediaItem.VideoProfile.Width = 120;

You may have noticed the ever so slightly funky code at the beginning :-). At the moment, when you get an instance of a VideoProfile or AudioProfile class back we're internally creating what is essentially a read only version. So if you try to change one of the parameters you'll get an exception. To fix this at the moment, you need to make a copy of the class before you can change it and this is what the Clone line does. When the RTM version of Expression Encoder comes out, this hopefully should no longer be necessary and you'll be able to change things directly as you'd expect.

After you've done all this, you can go ahead and call Encode on the job and you should end up with a video file that matches the profiles that you've set.

Overview of Expression Encoder 2

Dean Rowe — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 07:27:01 GMT

The session that our very own James and Charles did at Mix this morning is already online. I haven't had a chance to watch it myself yet, but I'm sure James and Charles did an excellent job.

Basic code to encode a file

Dean Rowe — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:11:27 GMT

Here's a very small snippet of code that uses the Expression Encoder object model to create a job, add a media file to the job and then encode it. There's a lot more to the object model, but I thought this would give a little taste of the basics. In the object model we wanted to expose most features of the full Encoder application, but we also wanted to make sure the user could do the simple operations without having to write a lot of code.

public void EncodeAFile()
{
    // Create a job and a media item for the video we wish to encode
    Job job = new Job();
    MediaItem mediaItem = new MediaItem(@"C:\input\MyVideo.avi");
    // Add the media item to the job
    job.MediaItems.Add(mediaItem);
    // Set the output directory where any encoded files will go.
    job.OutputDirectory = @"c:\output";
    // Set up the progress callback function
    job.PublishProgress += new EventHandler<PublishProgressEventArgs>(OnPublishProgress);
    // Encode the file
    job.Encode();
}

void OnPublishProgress(object sender, PublishProgressEventArgs e)
{
    Console.WriteLine(e.Progress);
}

Expression Encoder 2 Beta now available

Dean Rowe — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:02:34 GMT

Our very own James has done a great job listing all the new features of Expression Encoder 2, over on the Expression Encoder team blog. Check out the post here, and you can download the Beta here.

One of the things I've been working on for our version 2, is the .NET object model that we're now exposing. Over the next few posts, I'm hoping to talk about how you can use some of the features in the object model, along with a few code snippets showing how things go together.

It's alive

Dean Rowe — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:05:01 GMT

The Expression Encoder team blog is now live. Watch for more content coming over the next weeks.

http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/

Cool mention of Windows Vista Movie Maker and DVD Maker

Dean Rowe — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:19:19 GMT

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2193575,00.asp

Yes I know it's a little gratuitous :-), but I got forwarded this link today and it is very cool to see someone that is really happy using the products you worked on.

Also, I know I need to start writing some more posts here and try to add some content instead of links to content :-).

Some things that are currently going on:

Just starting to work on the what the object model for Expression Encoder will look like.

I recently got a new laptop which is a tablet (Lenovo X61T). The handwriting recognition in Vista is awesome (I'm writing this with the pen), and the battery life is superb.

My wife is due to give birth to our daughter in about a week. So maybe if the baby keeps us up all night, I'll write some posts then :-)

More Expression Encoder stuff

Dean Rowe — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 06:42:54 GMT

Hot on the heels of the release of the Expression Encoder, Ben Waggoner has worked on some training videos that were produced by Total Training that have now been released.

Here are the links

Introduction to Expression Encoder
Enhancing Media
Metadata, Markers, & Silverlight
Live Production
Advanced Expression Encoder

and you find lots more training of other products in the Expression suite on the Microsoft Expression Training page.

Also Channel 9 has another Expression Encoder video with our own James Clarke and Jim Thill

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=339887

Expression Encoder now available

Dean Rowe — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:06:32 GMT

Expression Encoder (formally called Expression Media Encoder) is now available to download.

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=encoder

If you've been using the earlier preview, then James has a great write up on his blog of the new features that have been added since that time.

http://www.clarkezone.net/default.aspx?id=c7a6bb98-f42b-49b6-aeba-e061722d69b8

RAW Support

Dean Rowe — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:02:46 GMT

I'm not sure how well known this is, but we did work in Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker to use the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) to make sure we supported images in the camera's RAW format.

I know some folks like to shoot photos in the RAW format and previously you would have to convert those files to JPG or something similar if you wanted to use them in Windows Movie Maker.

Well in Vista, if you've imported some RAW photos into your Photo gallery it will now give you the option to download the codec to support those files (every camera has it's own RAW format). I know the codec for Nikon camera's has been out for a while and Canon's was released not so long ago and there are probably other cameras supported too.

Once you've done that, you'll be able to view the photos in Photo Gallery and if you import them into Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker they will know how to use the photos directly as well.

Microsoft Expression Media Encoder Preview now available

Dean Rowe — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:42:00 GMT

You can now download the free trial preview of the Expression Media Encoder.

We still have a bunch more work to do, but you can try what's available at the moment, and please use the newsgroup to give us your feedback.

Link to Microsoft Expression Media Encoder