Silverlight Streaming Test
I've just been playing around with Silverlight Streaming for our upcoming Silverlight MSDN events. I'd made a Camtasia video of the Silverlight install experience and wanted to upload this as a Silverlight video delivered via Silverlight Streaming (I find that site very difficult to navigate). I ran into a few problems with the video as the output I generated from Camtasia wasn't Silverlight compatible.
Of course I could just transcode it with Microsoft Expression Encoder but that seemed like a bit of a cop out - I'd rather produce Silverlight compatible output from Camtasia. Unfortunately Silverlight doesn't support the Windows Media Screen codec (I knew this already) so I'd selected the "Camtasia Studio Best Quality and File Size" for producing my video. No dice.
I checked the SDK which lists compatible and unsupported formats. I noticed the Windows Media Audio Voice codec isn't supported and sure enough, that's what's used with the "Best Quality" option. I switched to "Camtasia Studio Full Motion Video High (CBR)" and hey presto I have a Silverlight compatible video. It's almost certainly not optimised (ie I could probably tweak some options and get better quality for the bandwidth) but it's only a 30s video so it suits my purposes.
I used Expression Encoder to create a video player app (so I encoded on "Source Profile" settings which I presume amounts to "pass-thru") and selected the "Glassy" template in "Job Output". Next thing I knew I had a sexy Silverlight video player.
Uploading to Silverlight Streaming was very straightforward. The quickstart gives you a manifest file for an Encoder produced video and you simply zip the whole lot up (minus a couple of files) and submit. There's a test page you can use to check your app works as expected and you're given the necessary markup to embed the Silverlight app in your own web page. That's exactly what I've done above and it works a treat.
Double click the video to watch it in full screen mode. Oh, and there's no audio as the idea is the presenter does the "voice over" in the session. It's just as well we made a video of this as uninstalling the Silverlight 1.1 plug-in took an age on my machine for some reason (install is lighting fast). Seems to uninstall fine for other colleagues though... Shrugs....
