Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 64) Express Y ourself By Jan Ozer icrosoft Silverlight is like the proverbial elephant; your impression depends upon where you touch it. In this article, I’ll touch it at the Expression Encoder, which is the encoding component of Expression Studio. Specifically, this article describes how to produce a Silverlight-compatible “media experience” with Expression Encoder, then upload it to the Silverlight Streaming Server, a streaming service offered by Microsoft, and to your own website. In this article I will focus on on-demand encoding, not live video encoding. By way of background, you can read all about Silverlight in Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen’s “New Kids in Town” (Streaming Media, June/July, pp. 88–94). From my perspective, Silverlight poses two main questions. The first question is whether to adopt Silverlight as a design and development architecture, particularly over Flash, and I’m not going there. The other question has a very easy answer: If you’re already producing Windows Media files, should you switch to Silverlight? There are some absolute bars to Silverlight. It currently doesn’t perform multicasting as robustly as Windows Media, it doesn’t offer server-side playlists or multiple bitrate files, and it doesn’t support the Windows Media 9 screen capture codec. In addition, Silverlight uses the same audio and video codecs as the current Windows Media Encoder, so you shouldn’t expect any increase in audio/visual quality. M 64 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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