Ben Waggoner

Ben Waggoner

Total Posts: 93 |
This blog focuses on Silverlight from a media technology perspective. It also covers encoding in supported formats, particularly Windows Media.
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AVS2ASF – Open Source VC-1 Encoder SDK application

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Jan 7th @ 1:31 AM
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As you may recall, we released the VC-1 Encoder SDK Professional as as free download. That included a very basic command-line encoder along the lines of Alex Zambelli’s WMCmd.vbs, but with much more limited input support and no preprocessing. A fellow called Kurtnoise13 jumped on it on the Doom9 Forums discussion about the SDK. He quickly created a new version that supports AVISynth files as source as well.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: AVISynth, avs2asf, compression, VC-1, VC-1 Encoder SDK

Best practices for Windows Media Encoder in 2009

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Jan 5th @ 8:54 PM
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I’ve had a bunch of emails lately from people still using Windows Media Encoder for a variety of reasons. A surprising number of people seem to be using ancient versions of actual encoder .dll files, so I figured it was time for one-last roundup post for best practices with WME and the old Format SDK. Hopefully everyone’s planning their migration to a VC-1 Encoder SDK based product, but for those who can’t move yet, please follow these best practices.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, Expression Encoder, silverlight, VC-1, VC-1 Encoder SDK, Windows Media Encoder, Windows Media Player, WMcmd.vbs, WMV9 PowerToy

Moonlight 1.0 beta 1 is out

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Dec 16th, 2008 @ 2:35 AM
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Moonlight is a GPL'ed open source implementation of Silverlight, created by the Mono team at Novell. While it's a Novell project, we're helping them out, and I'm excited at the progress that they've made, and that we'll have a free software playback option for Silverlight. And thus, the beta 1 of Moonlight 1.0 is now available. Moonlight 1.0 maps to Silverlight 1.0, so you've got good XAML support. But there's no .NET bytecode support, so logic takes places inside the browser's JavaScript engine. Beta 1 also includes support for the "Microsoft Media Pack" described here…[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: Miguel de Icaza, Mono, moonlight, Novell, silverlight

Custom Slider for Silverlight 2 Media Players available for download

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 25th, 2008 @ 8:03 PM
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Sorry it's taken so long, but we've now got the Custom Slider for Silverlight 2 Media Players up on MSDN.

Unlike the snippits I included earlier, this is a full project that can be modified. It’s being made available under the Microsoft Public License.

Code Gallery Page
Project Download

Enjoy!
Tags: C#, silverlight, XAML

Netflix’s Neil Hunt shares encoding workflow info

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 19th, 2008 @ 8:50 PM
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Now, this is a blog post! Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix, has just put up a great blog post talking about their encoding workflow for their video streaming services. It’s full of awesomeness, but I wanted to excerpt the section describing their 1st gen, 2nd gen, and HD encoding settings and workflow. First Generation Encoding Our first set of encodes are based on WMV3 and WMA in ASF with WMDRM10 (Janus). We chose these standards because the Janus components have been widely adopted by our CE partners such as Roku, LG Electronics, Samsung, TiVo, and of course Microsoft Xbox. We…[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, HD, Netflix, silverlight, VC-1, WMV

Silverlight 2 launch party in Portland tonight

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 11th, 2008 @ 7:06 PM
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PDXUX.Net is hosting a Silverlight 2 launch party in Portland tonight, at North.

Tim Heuer will be the featured presenter, and I’ll come in and do fifteen minutes or so of media demos. There will be ample time for mingling and Q&A as well.

Sorry it’s such a last minute announce – we only just worked out the plan.
Tags: party, silverlight, Tim Heuer

Building high-performance Silverlight Media Players

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 3rd, 2008 @ 6:33 PM
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Overview So, I get involved in a ton of conversations with various internal and external customers about building Silverlight media players. The great thing about Silverlight is that it's deep, and provides lots of ways to build complex applications that include media playback. The flip side of that is that, like all software engineering, there's plenty of sub-optimal ways to do thing that can have a negative impact on media playback performance. While it's tempting to assume everyone's got a hopping dual-core machine these days, that's not the case. When we reviewed the demographics for the…[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: media players, programming, silverlight

NetFlix Silverlight player now in open Beta

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 3rd, 2008 @ 2:18 PM
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Just a quick note - NetFlix is offering an open beta for their new Silverlight-based player.

It's an opt-in, and once you opt-in, you need to use Silverlight on all your machines you use for "Watch Instantly."

[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: Netflix, silverlight

New Custom Slider for Silverlight 2 media players

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 28th, 2008 @ 6:13 PM
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My Silverlight teammates Akshay Johar and Andre Michaud have built a new custom slider for use in Silverlight 2 media players.

When you scrub the default slider in a MediaElement today, it generates a whole slew of valueChanged events, resulting in a huge number of seeks per second. This can confuse media playback, particularly when streaming from Windows Media Services, which then gets flooded with many requests a second.

Essentially it detects a “crazy mode” scrub, and quietly ignores it while the “crazy mode” is in place.

[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: C#, silverlight, XAML

Silverlight 2 powering Netflix on Mac

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 27th, 2008 @ 8:38 PM
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It's been discussed for a while, but the time is now - Netflix has just announced Silverlight 2 will power their streaming video service, which had been Windows-only until now. Silverlight 2 adds support for PlayReady DRM, so we now have the same DRM support on Mac and Windows. The service will be available on Xbox 360 as well. You have to be a Netflix subscriber of course, but the content is commercial-free and much higher quality than the various free video services.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, Netflix, Playready, silverlight, Theory, xbox 360
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