Ben Waggoner

Ben Waggoner

Total Posts: 90 |
This blog focuses on Silverlight from a media technology perspective. It also covers encoding in supported formats, particularly Windows Media.
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Custom Slider for Silverlight 2 Media Players available for download

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Nov 25th @ 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 @ 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 @ 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 @ 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 @ 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 @ 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 @ 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

Final Olympics numbers

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 19th @ 9:49 PM
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People kept asking me about this on my just completed tour of Asia, so here’s a blog post that’s got the final numbers for the NBCOlympics.com video delivery with Silverlight.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: NBC, NBCOlympics.com, olympics, silverlight

Silverlight 2 Released!

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Oct 14th @ 12:24 PM
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It was a long time coming, but today was the day. Silverlight 2 was released to the web today! I'm in Shenzen, where it's after midnight, so I'll just list a few links.[Click to read the full post ]
Tags: China, silverlight, silverlight 2

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
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