Silverlight Media is continuous, rich, and flexible. It uses the standard VC-1 standard (which is the type of encoding used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) as one of its media formats (of course, WMA and WMV and MP3 are supported as well).
Grab the Silverlight Javascript Template for Visual Studio (from Silverlight.net?) and you’re up and running.
If you don’t give the XAML MediaElement a site, it will inherit the dimensions of the media source. If you want, you can set the size as well (to up-scale or down-scale the size, as you wish).
isWindowless: true, background: “transparent”
Setting both of these attributes on the Silverlight object loader .js will effectively hide the “window” that the Silverlight browser object loads in, and sets its background color to transparent, this is how you can add a very seemless UX. Additonally, you can set the Opacity of your MediaElement to any level of opacity that you want, so you can see through your media element to the background behind it. Cool, eh?
Markers
A property of MediaElement is “Markers.” Markers give you trigger events that you can listen for and handle however you like (think: display lyrics timed to a music video; display an ad when a goal is scored in your streamed soccer game; etc.)
TV Demo
Mike Harsh showed us a sweet little demo which started out as a pic-in-pic streaming tv player. That’s cool. Then he clicked the pic-in-pic area and 8 more “windows” opened up on top of the playing video (animating out the content, while the videos are streaming int). So, on the screen, through the browser, over the internet, there were 10 video streams playing in the browser at the same time. All all with about 60% processor use (though we don’t know what the proc speed was in the demo box).
In Silverlight 1.1 they’ll be adding alpha video (think: transparent video overlays… on top of another video clip… blue-screen/green-screen for the web!). Wow!
Fun Quote
“So our play button doesn’t look very nice, so we’ll go into Expression Designer, open up our Visual Studio project, because they all talk the same project format, and we can add a nice glass overlay, because that’s what all the kids are doing these days.” — Mike Harsh @ MIX07
