Contents tagged with Expression Encoder
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Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 announcement roundup
So, Silverlight 3 was released today, and the Expression Studio is available in a public release candidate, including the awesome Expression Encoder 2.
I'll have a bunch more to say about it, of course, but first off let me just provide links to the important stuff relating to the media side of things.
Scott Guthrie's always-excellent blog post roundup:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-released.aspx
Technical overview of media features:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/media/media-details.aspx#smooth
Expression Encoder 3 overview:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder_Overview.aspx
Extensive blog post about Expression Encoder 3 new features (it is awesome):
http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionencoder/archive/2009/07/10/9828866.aspx
Alas, the RC of that isn't available for download quite yet. Soon, I'm told.
And I had this interview on Streaming Media about the new media features:
http://streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268 -
My Silverlight 3 preview up at StreamingMedia.com
The newest in my "Silverlight Guru" interviews with Troy Dreier is up now. It offers a concise overview of some of the big features we have coming for Silverlight 3 and with our encoding infrastructure.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268
And the previous installments are here:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11188
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11140
We're doing these roughly once a month, mainly driven by questions from the Streaming Media forums or send directly to Troy.
As Troy alwasy ends the interviews:
Submit your Silverlight questions to Streaming Media’s Formats, Codecs, and Players forum, or send them directly to the author at -
First Smooth Streaming User-Generated Content
So, this is irrationally exciting for me; what's perhaps the first UGC (user-generated content) in Smooth Streaming. Two of our awesome evangelists, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toldeo were in New Zealand for WEB09. They were invited to do a code-off with three Adobe representatives to build a cool app to raffle off the event prizes. Needless to say, they scored an overwhelming victory, even outnumbered 3:2. One would expect no less; no real news there.
What I'm jazzed about is that our local NZ web whiz Nigel Parker went and posted a Smooth Streaming video of the darn thing! And none of us Redmond-based video nerd knew about it until it had been live for a couple of days! We on the video side had been talking about how to jumpstart Smooth Streaming UGC, and here these guys go ahead and just do it.
So, in a foreshadowing of how it'll feel when my kids head off to college, all our work on Silverlight, Expression Encoder, and IIS Smooth Streaming has apparently paid off, and even developer/designer evangelists can now author, encode, and post nicely done Smooth Streaming video, and on a lark.
I must admit this disturbing trend for me personaly, as they're now far better compressionists than I am a developer or designer. I could assuage myself by noting they should have used Denoise, and the player's embeded size isn't calibrated to provide Fast Path playback at the highest resolution. But that's weak tea at best. They did well, without a word of advice from Alex or myself.
I clearly need to go back to our codec PhDs and ask them to add strange options with even more esoteric names; Adaptive Deadzone and DQuant apparently weren't a high enough barrier to entry. Perhaps "Chroma subsampling phase decorrelator?" Too Trek. "motion-vector back-propogation feedback via lookahead for per macroblock differental quantization rate distortion optimization" Hmmm, that actually might work. "Pixel-throoper?" I need the flanger for compression...
Joking aside, a big goal of Silverlight is to expand the reach of our community of developers and designers, and making stuff they can casually use like this is exactly what we are trying to do.
I can't wait to see what they'll do with Silverlight 3 and Expression Encoder 3. We're just getting started. -
NAB 2009 Ben Waggoner Compression Party and booth schedule
I was out sick last week, and I’m not emotionally prepared to admit that NAB is next week.
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Proposed definition of HD on the web, with examples
The essential Dan Rayburn had a good blog post asking we, Adobe, and the industry overall agree on a definition for HD Video on the web.
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Beta Release of Smooth Streaming!
It’s alive!
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Encoding Big Buck Bunny for SmoothHD.com
So far, Alex Zambelli has had most of the SmoothHD.com fun while I was off on some other projects, but this time he was off on some other projects and I got to do an encode all myself.
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Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 – Intro and Multibitrate Encoding
Oh, I’m a bad, bad blogger. The Expression Encoder Service Pack 1 has been out for MONTHS, and and it’s cool enough that I haven’t had the time to do it full justice. Oh well, better short than nothing; I’ll just start off with the biggest new feature: multibitrate encoding, including support for Smooth Streaming.