Transcoding media files for Silverlight
Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio and Video (WMA, VC-1/WMV7-9) and MP3 formats. If you have existing media assets in other formats, you can convert them into a format Silverlight can understand. There are a couple ways to do this.
On your desktop using Expression Encoder
- Use the user interface for granular control over the entire user experience on your media files with support for encoding, enhancement and publishing for Silverlight
- Or use the command line interface for batch processing
- Choose this when you do not have abundant bandwidth to upload media assets to Silverlight Streaming for encoding or transcoding
- Choose this if you have adequate CPU power on your desktop to transcode your assets
- Expression Encoder can upload your media files to the Silverlight Streaming service using this plug-in
In the cloud using Silverlight Streaming
- The companion service to Silverlight on the cloud at http://silverlight.live.com/ provides transcoding support in the Video Management area
- Choose this if you have enough bandwidth to upload (unencoded) media assets to the cloud
- Choose this if you do not have adequate CPU power on your desktop machines to efficiently encode/transcode media assets
- Choose this if you would like to offload your media hosting to Microsoft's high performance, geo-scale content delivery network (CDN)
PS: my one gripe is that the Silverlight Streaming SDK docs do not explicitly say which file formats it can transcode for you. I know they support .mov, but what about .flv? Hoping they fix this soon.
Update [3/12/2008] : Thanks to Anoop Anantha, WL Platform Architect, I've now learned that Silverlight Streaming will transcode mpeg2, mpeg4, divX, H.264, flv formats, among others, to a Silverlight-friendly wmv format. He mentioned they will be updating the docs.
PPS: tip o' the hat to Angus Logan for his excellent talk at Mix 08 on Windows Live services.
Labels: Audio, Media, Silverlight, Silverlight Streaming, Transcode, Video
