Hi,

I was wondering, with the new Silverlight Streaming beta service, can one upload a video and stream it as a url (i.e. from a WPF or Silverlight MediaElement) or is it required that a xaml application package for SS be run to house the video and load that application cross-domain (in an iframe or control).

 Thanks,

Tian

Could you please clarify your question? First of all, to stream video you need Windows Media Services on SS. On the CS you would have a silverlight app inside the page, that would have a MediaElement, which will receive and display the steam from a server.

Tomorrow is going to be better!! (c)

Hi,
I was actually referring to the Silverlight Streaming Service by Microsoft : http://streaming.live.com/ where they offer 10gb of storage for video delivery. My question was, for a video hosted on the SSS, does the video need to be wrapped in a silverlight application (xap) that is hosted on SSS or can a client-side silverlight mediaelement connect directly to the video through some url.

 I guess the new Silverlight streaming hasn't been unveiled yet, as I was under the impression from MIX the service would also do encoding and variable bit rate streaming when any video is uploaded.
 

You can do both actually.

Scenario 1: check out http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/halo3.aspx. The application (xaml, js, ...) and all its media assets (videos, images, text, etc.) are hosted in SLS and instantiated within an iframe on the page of the web site. If you do that, you can reference your videos the standard way in your player, and upload everything to SLS when you're done.

Scenario 2: check out http://halo3.msn.com/videos.aspx. The application is hosted on the msn.com web server, but the media assets (large video files, encoded at 700 kbps for the low res, and 2 Mbps for the high res) are all coming from SLS. To do that, check out http://dev.live.com/silverlight/initparams.aspx. You have to pass a URL constructed as streaming:/account_ID/fileSet/fileName to initParams of your player, and this will be converted to a http:// URL consumable by your media element.

There is no http endpoint to files hosted in SLS at this point in time.

 Awesome, thanks for the info! Scenario 2 was exactly what I was looking for, I guess I was reading outdated info on msdn.

Cheers!

Tian

You're welcome. Also check out my reply to a similar question I addressed tonight on http://silverlight.net/forums/p/10347/38280.aspx. I made the sample downloadable.

If you have the ability to run some of your own asp.net code on your server, you can check out my solution to this problem.

 http://www.slickthought.net/post/2008/04/Cracking-the-Silverlight-Streaming-Direct-Content-Access-Code.aspx and http://www.slickthought.net/post/2008/05/Cracking-the-Silverlight-Streaming-Direct-Content-Access-Code---Part-II.aspx

Both are a lot "cleaner" to use on the client than dealing with funky initParams and such.