Union Budget Live with Silverlight- Real-time chat with TV anchors

This year’s Union Budget will be different. We all have been watching the budget speech on TV or reading about it,but this year’s Budget will be streamed Live using Microsoft Silverlight* , so that you can watch it on your PC. Users will get live coverage of both ET Now and Times Now as well as on-demand videos, live news feeds, special updates and will also be able to interact with Facebook friends--all from a single show window. And with Facebook Connect and Live Stream Box, they will be able to take part in real-time conversations with their favorite TV anchors. (Cartoon courtesy: Economic Times)

 

The event will be hosted at http://budgetlive.economictimes.com  You can also get minute-by-minute update and live news feeds if you are interested in specific parts of the budget. Powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight, users will get to watch a high quality video stream on the web- like TV, only significantly better.

(* Download Silverlight from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx)

 

Angus Logan on Windows Live

Angus Logan from the Windows Live team shares his thoughts on the evolution of Windows Live and Windows Live services, social networking, Live Mesh, and what it all means for developers.

TechEd: Angus Logan on Windows Live

NBCOlympics.com and Silverlight

As I had posted (Olympics and Silverlight) earlier about the Beijing Olympics which are scheduled to begin from 08-08-08 has signed an agreement with Microsoft to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based Web Broadcast which will provide users with over 3000 Hrs. of Live and on-demand video content via Silverlight Streaming. Users can experience the rich content of every event. And now the NBCOlympics .com Beta site has been put up and one can have an idea what is going to come, Check out their Silverlight Based Enhanced Player. Some screenshots of the Silverlight based Player for Olympics:

It has provided options for Social Bookmarking sites.

You can also embed it in your site or Blog.

Its also available to be put as a Desktop gadget.

Its still in Beta , expect lots of more features and improvements.

Video.Show - Creating your own YouTube-style site

Video.Show is a reference-quality blueprint for implementing a user-generated video content site. It provides everything you need to create a website for uploading, encoding, cataloguing, publishing and commenting on videos, using Silverlight, Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live.

Setting up your own video community website can be a real headache. There's a lot to worry about: disk space, bandwidth, video formats and encoding...

Video.Show does all of the hard work for you. The key is Silverlight technology paired up with Silverlight Streaming's free, world class content hosting. Video.Show provides Silverlight video controls, Silverlight Streaming hosting integration, leveraging Expression Encoder's ability to handle most popular video formats so you can be uploading videos within minutes.

Few months back Tim Sneath had announced about the final version of Video.Show, a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! Following is the part of the announcement he made:

You might be interested in Video.Show if:

• Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access;
• You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start;
• You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox;
• You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch;
• You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos;
• You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies.

Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express and Expression Encoder; the software is built to guide you through a few simple configuration steps (setting an admin password and obtaining a Silverlight Streaming key), and then you're up and running

He also gives one of his favorite real-world practical implementations of Video.Show example as filmsforlearning.org, a UK-based education site for students and teachers.Since the release of Video.Show there have been many thousands of downloads.

For more details check the codeplex link and Tims Sneath Blog post.

Also check this link for demonstrating the experience for a user without Silverlight installed.

Video.Show is a Microsoft Software-plus-Services Blueprint. Software-plus-Services Blueprints are a series of open source frameworks and workflow-based guidance packages designed to provide an architectural bridge and reduce the friction you experience building real-world Software-plus-Services applications. The source code can be downloaded from codeplex.

2008 Olympics and Silverlight

Last month I had posted Microsoft Silverlight and Cricket where a Twenty-20 Cricket Tournament, ICL was also available as live feed using Silverlight Streaming. One was able to watch all the matches Live using Silverlight. It was a smooth experience watching the video powered by Silverlight.

Now comes another bigger news. 2008 Summer Olympic Games which will be held in Beijing from 08-08-08 has signed an agreement with Microsoft to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast. This agreement also sets MSN as the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics. 

Somasegar's weblog reports ,

"As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming.  This means that viewers can access every minute of every event.  Additionally, the amount of meta-data attached to each of the streams will be extensive and include links to player bios, medal counts, shortcuts to particular events (i.e. athlete x’s third long-jump attempt), maps of the Olympic facilities, pop-up overlays with real-time event alerts, headlines, video search capabilities, etc. "

That's a huge boost to Silverlight, redefining sports content online, considering the vastness and richness of any Olympics games. Great going Silverlight !! I am sure it will be a very rich experience viewing this on-demand video content.

Silverlight Pumpkin Greeting Card

Checkout this Pumpkin Greeting Card for Halloween based on Silverlight, Thanks to Adam Kinney!


If you also want to display this card on your site , use this code: (thanks to Adam again)


Silverlight streaming plugin for Windows Live Writer- Step by Step

So here's the details about the Silverlight streaming plugin about which I had posted in my previous post and also the steps how to use it.

I came across this post from James E. Clarke, where he talks about direct publishing from Expression Media Encoder (EME) to Silverlight Streaming. That will be very good addition, no need of going to Silverlight Streaming site, but publish it from EME itself. So waiting for that feature.

You just have to enter Application name, Account ID and Key of your Silverlight Streaming account and then it will upload.


In the same post he talks of a very nice Silverlight plugin and SkyDrive plugin for WL Writer.

Now, talking of Silverlight streaming plugin, one can insert pre-existing Silverlight Streaming applications into blog posts using this plugin. As he writes, its not yet been posted to Writer plugin Gallery, and will be done shortly. So this is a brand new plugin written just on 10th Aug. for demoing at Gnomedex conference. But you can download it from SilverlightStreamingLivewriter.zip. (if this link does not work in future, plugin will be available on Writer plugin Gallery soon). Its a small zip file, download it, unzip and drop it into %programfiles%\Windows Live Writer\Plugins directory.

So when you open Windows Live Writer next time , it'll be listed there.
Now when you click on the 'Insert Silverlight Streaming' , it''ll open a window where you have to type your Silverlight Streaming Accounts ID and key , where you have uploaded your Silverlight Streaming App.
Then press refresh , so that it'll list all the Applications uploaded there. Select the app you want to post and press OK.

That's all, and publish it.
Really a fantastic plugin.

Thanks again to James E. Clarke and Angus Logan for the nice post.
With the recent update to the Silverlight Streaming service where you can now invoke Silverlight Streaming applications without JavaScript and using "iFrame" tag, about which I had posted earlier, and incorporating that in a plugin is fantastic.

Update : The plugin is now available on Windows Live Gallery , and can be downloaded from here.

Silverlight streaming plugin for Windows Live Writer

I am posting a Silverlight streaming video from Windows Live Writer to my blog, using Silverlight plugin, details about which I'll write in my next post.

This is fantastic, its become so easy to post a Silverlight Streaming on your Blog, even Blogger.

Thanks to James E. Clarke for the plugin. Will provide the link in my next post.

Silverlight Streaming in almost any Web Page

As I had posted earlier about Silverlight Streaming on sites which do not allow you to host .js files, like this Blogger site, you would have to make changes to blog template code etc. to do this.

But, now it has been made very easy. You can now invoke Silverlight Streaming applications without JavaScript. With a recent update to the Silverlight Streaming service, it's now even easier to instantiate a hosted app on a web page. The Silverlight Streaming service supports a URL syntax for self-contained web pages that have nothing but your Silverlight Streaming-hosted application.

You use "iFrame" tag to embed Silverlight applications on the sites that do not allow you to add JavaScript, provided they support iFrames.

In order to use this , you have to just add this to your page or even post in your Blog:

"http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/accountId/appName/iframe.html", where account ID is your account ID of Silverlight Streaming account details and appname is the name you have given to your uploaded Silverlight application.

Here's example which shows an animated Silverlight logo using the code given below, uploaded to Silverlight Streaming as an application of the account ID #32 and uploaded appname as SlLogo.

This is all you have to put to get what you are seeing at the bottom- an animated logo of Silverlight logo

Check out these Links referred for more details:

• Silverlight Streaming News


• Invoking your application with an iFrame


• How to Embed Silverlight Content in Almost Any Web Page


• Silverlight Streaming: new iframe-based invocation mechanism
  
  
  

Changes to Silverlight Streaming

As you all know Silverlight1.0 RC has been released and I had posted about it earlier. And those who are having Silverlight Streaming application have to make changes accordingly to invoke and to make it compatible with the new version of Silverlight.

I had earlier posted "Silverlight Streaming on blogger Step by Step" and had posted various steps involved. But that will not work on the end users browser having Silverlight RC as I had that streaming done with Beta version.

So one has to make the following changes to invoke Silverlight Streaming application.

1. Include the new silverlight.js from http://agappdom.net/h/silverlight.js (instead of "http://agappdom.net/g/silverlight.js ")
2. Call Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx() (instead of Sys.Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx()

Make no changes to allow your existing applications to continue to run with the 1.0 beta release of Silverlight. Please note that while Silverlight Streaming can host both 1.0 beta and 1.0 RC applications, the end user's browser must have the version of Silverlight that matches the application.

Silverlight Streaming on blogger Step by Step

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications

For Silverlight Streaming, first of all you should have a Silverlight Streaming account. For this go to silverlight.live.com and create an account and you'll get 4GB of free hosting space to upload your media content.

Now follow these steps:z

Get yourself Expression Media Encoder which will be use for encoding. Now Encode your video. You can choose, what kind of audio/video profile you want as shown from the choice according to server you are targeting.

Also choose a player template you want from the output tab as shown.

After completion of Encoding process, the media file will open in the browser so that one can check it.After encoding you'll get an output directory with media file and other related files as shown.

Out of these files, you won't need .html, .aspx, .media, .csproj or .config files for Silverlight Streaming service, so you can delete them from the output directory. But you have to add a Manifest file, which describes the application.

Just open Notepad and type the content as shown and save it as Manifest.xml and add it with other files in the directory.

Now just zip all the files, but ensure that all the files are in root of zip file and not in any directory. Now you'll be having a zip file , ready to upload.

Now go to silverlight.live.com and from 'Manage Applications' upload the zip file. After that you'll be provided with the code that has to be added to your page.

But here, for us , slight change will be required as we want to do Silverlight Streaming on Blogger Blog as in one the steps of the code which we got says to put the code in a separate createSilverlight.js file which is not possible on Blogger as they won't allow you to host .js files. So first you have to modify the Blogger template.

So open the template settings and from 'edit HTML' put these code lines under 'head' sectionThe above CreateSilverlight() function code should be in single line by removing any white spaces.

Now put the code obtained from 2nd step in body section, here you can specify the size of streaming media you want by changing width and height in the div tag. Save the template and post content and publish, if there are no errors, you can see the streaming video.

Here's the link where I had earlier posted the streaming video and various references on this Blog.

TIP: You must have seen that the video starts playing as soon as you open the page. So how to change this default behavior? Try this tip;

After encoding you'll get many files as shown above, among that there's a file called startplayer.js, you'll have to edit it after encoding and then zip it for uploading. You have to make autoplay to false as shown.

...............

StartPlayer_0.prototype= {
_handleLoad: function() {
this._player = $create( ExtendedPlayer.Player,
{ // properties
rootElement : $get(this._hostname).content.findName('Main'),
autoPlay : false,
volume : 1.0,
muted : false,
startTime : 0.0,
loopCount : 1,
autoScale : true
},
{ // event handlers
stateChanged: Function.createDelegate(this, this._onStateChanged)
},
null, $get(this._hostname) );
this._playNextVideo();
}, .....

UPDATE (1 Aug 07) : Changes to Silverlight Streaming

Silverlight Streaming Demo on Blogger blog

I had prepared and wanted to post a Silverlight Streaming video on Blogger Blog since some time, but somehow missed that, Now here's the demo video. This video shows various MVPs from all over the world. This video was released on MVP Global Summit 2007.
EDIT : This video has been disabled as there are better ways for playing Silverlight videos now. I have removed the earlier method.

Thanks to these , i refered to
Posting a Silverlight Streaming video on ur blog By Abhishek Kant
Windows Live Quantum Mechanics
Silverlight-enabled Blogger Template
Silverlight Streaming is Now Live

Soon I will be posting the steps required to post a Silverlight Streaming video such as this one (on Blogger Blog), as these won't let you serve .js files from their domain.

UPDATE (1 Aug 07) : Changes to Silverlight Streaming

EDIT : This video has been disabled as there are better ways for playing Silverlight videos, as can be seen from Above link.