After rooting around the Silverlight tutorials and documentation for a while I quickly became sidetracked by the attractions of being able to easily embed video into the a web page using Silverlight. A Microsoft colleague of mine from Redmond, Jim Thill, was recently down here in Singapore visiting and had shown us a very cool demo where he used Expression Encoder to do very fancy video editing and encoding followed by automatically having it uploaded to a ridiculously cool online service called Silverlight Streaming (anyone can try it out here and get 4Gb of space for free).

So here's what I did:

• Installed Expression Encoder and the Silverlight Streaming Publishing plug-in.
• Created a Silverlight Streaming account noting the account ID and key.
• Selected a very cool video of me playing this stunning original composition* on my guitar which might attract the attention of the major labels who would then shower me with record deal advances and promises of groupie-laden tours as the new Bob Dylan.
• Crossed my fingers and hoped in vain that record company execs and A&R men read MSDN blogs.
• Imported it into Expression Encoder.
• Used Encoder's features to:
• Crop the video as easily as I might crop a .jpg in Windows Picture Manager or any other similar application just by dragging some little knobbers. This had the added advantage of removing my flabby drooling lower lip from most of the video as well as allowing me to raise the bottom so you can't see my knobbly knees too much.
• Set the output size and aspect ratio with a simple check box selection. This video started out in regular 4:3 but I changed it easily to 16:9 so I could pretend I was in the movies.
• Create an overlay so that if anybody of you wanted to pirate my video and upload it onto Youtube I'd soon scupper you because it has that tell-tale little cartoon Thumbs-Up Monkey in the upper left corner. This is easy to do - basically select a .jpg file and drag it where I want it positioned, set the opacity if preferred and Encoder does the rest.
• Automatically publish it to Silverlight Streaming Services (using aforementioned ID and key).

Next, I installed the Lighterfuel plug-in for Windows Live Writer (the client I use to write this blog because it's so flipping fabulous (you can get it here) and started typing this. It's very to insert a Silverlight video now from the task pane - there's an 'insert Silverlight Streaming' thingy that just makes it absolutely idiotproof (ok - I admit I messed around with that for an infinitesimally short while) to do this.

So here's the end result. It works best with your sound on (Leon).

Isn't that just totally bitchin'?

*Ok. It's not original. If you know the name of the track and who originally played it, post your comment here. First one to get it right wins some naked pictures from the Internet. I won't say of what though so that anyone claiming I outraged their modesty will have a hard time making a case. The prize isn't what really matters anyway - it's more about the kudos of having your comment on my blog which will no doubt be a digital media sensation within the next few weeks.

P.S. Da Bomb Mothership for all the info on this stuff is here.