Ben Waggoner

Ben Waggoner

Total Posts: 81 |
This blog focuses on Silverlight from a media technology perspective. It also covers encoding in supported formats, particularly Windows Media.
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Demo of Silverlight 2 scaling quality improvements

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 2nd @ 5:03 PM
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My colleague Donald Karlov did a A/B compare for me showing the quality improvement for scaling between Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the new Silverlight 2 RC0. Check this detail of a shot from an encode I did of Big Buck Bunny, scaled to 2.5x (640x360 to 1600x900 – a pretty common scaling ratio for full-screen playback on a smaller LCD or a laptop).[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: Big Buck Bunny, silverlight, silverlight 2, video quality

Silverlight 2 RC0 is out

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 1st @ 11:01 AM
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The first public release canditate (RCo) for Silverlight 2 is now available for download by developers. While anyone can install it, the main goal is for developers to make sure they aren't hit by any breaking changes for Silverlight 2 RTM so they can fix any issues.

All Silverlight 1.0 projects should work fine, but there may be some Silverlight 2 Beta projects that require updates.

For the media folks, there's a couple of new things I want to mention...
[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, developers, Expression Encoder, silverlight, silverlight 2, VC-1

First MediaStreamSource example is up

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 1st @ 10:04 AM
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My colleague Larry Olson has posted the first public demo project for MediaStreamSource. This new Silverlight 2 feature enables file parsers and network protocols to be implemented in managed code inside of Silverlight, thus enabling support beyond the built-in native formats. Since MSS passes off the compressed media samples to the native decoders, it should offer nearly the same performance as a native code implementation (parsers aren't that expensive). But since it runs inside of the Silverlight managed code sandbox, support for new formats and protocols can be just added into player's…[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: Larry Olson, MediaStreamSource, silverlight

Expression Encoder Service Pack 1 preview

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Sep 23rd @ 11:19 PM
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James Clarke has a blog post up describing some of the new features in the forthcoming Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1.

It's got some great new stuff, and we're demoing it here at Streaming Media West this week.


[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, Expression Encoder, H.264, silverlight, VC-1

Ben's IBC Schedule

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Sep 10th @ 12:54 PM
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So, if you're coming to IBC, come swing by the Topaz Lounge and say hello. I'll be demoing on the below schedule, alternating between the Silverlight Formats pod and floating between pods answering questions. And yes, we'll be showing H.264 playback in Silverlight at the Formats pod.

The Topaz Lounge is a little out of the way, but that means it's not nearly as deafening as the show floor. Last year we had a complementary coffee/soda bar set up.

 

 

Friday, September 12th

11:45am - 3:00pm: Silverlight Formats

 

Saturday, September 13th

9:15 am - 1:30pm: Floating

 

Sunday, September 14th

9:15 am - 1:30pm: Silverlight Formats

 

Monday, September 15th

1:30pm - 6:00pm: Silverlight Formats

 

Tuesday, September 16th

9:15 am - 12:30pm: Floating

H.264 and AAC support coming in Silverlight

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Sep 9th @ 3:09 PM
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So, our big IBC press announcement went out this morning. Lots of blog-worthy stuff in there, but as a compression nerd, it's the codec stuff I'm going to talk about first. The big news is that, yes, we're going to add support for MPEG-4 to Silverlight, in the version coming after the fast-approaching fall release of Silverlight 2.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, H.264, IBC, silverlight, VC-1, Windows Media

Technical Emmy for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Aug 28th @ 3:05 PM
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I have many ways of reminding my wife I'm an hopeless video nerd. Among them is that I only pay attention to the Emmy Awards she's watching when the recap of the technical awards comes on.

So, I was really excited that our own Dr. Gary Sullivan, chairman of the Joint Video Team, was on hand last week to receive a 2008 Primetime Emmy® Engineering Award for developing H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile.

[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: AVC, codecs, compression, Emmy, Gary Sullivan, H.264, VC-1

Alex Zambelli's blog is reborn with Olympics info roundup

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Aug 15th @ 3:55 PM
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Yikes! No posts since early July. I've been a bad, bad blogger. Fortunately, compression wizard Alex Zambelli's blog has relaunched to take up the slack!

He's started off with a series of Olympics posts.

 

NBC Olympics 24/7 - a great roundup of information and details

NBC Olympics video without Silverlight? - showing how to play back the Olympics without Silverlight on Windows (and why you'd want to use the Silverlight version if given a choice).

Why no full screen mode in the NBC Olympics player?, citing this silverlight.net forum discussion including information from our own Tom Taylor.

 

Hopefully he'll inspire me to get back at it...
Tags: Alex Zambelli, compression, olympics, silverlight

Silverlight Skinning in Flip4Mac

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Jul 3rd @ 6:54 PM
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Much has been made of our making the Mac a first-class citizen of Silverlight. We build the Mac and Windows versions together, and release them simultaneously. We've intentionally structured Silverlight to minimize dependencies on the underlying hardware and OS, and carry around all our codecs inside the runtime.

What I haven't talked a whole lot about in too long is our support for authoring Silverlight video experiences on the Mac.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, Flip4Mac, silverlight, VC-1

Low Latency webcasting with Windows Media and Siverlight

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Jun 22nd @ 1:25 AM
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So, Streaming Media is doing a special "Europe edition" of Streaming Media, and I'm doing an article about webcasting for it. I've getting a bunch of questions about how to deliver low-latency live streaming to Silverlight, and so with their permission, I'm excerpting this section on that topic.

EDIT: A correction was made; turning off Fast Cache in Windows Media Services does not have any effect on webcasting latency.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: compression, Expression Encoder, Live, Streaming Media, VC-1, Webcasting, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Encoder
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