Compression

I’ve had a bunch of emails lately from people still using Windows Media Encoder for a variety of reasons. A surprising number of people seem to be using ancient versions of actual encoder .dll files, so I figured it was time for one-last roundup post for best practices with WME and the old Format…

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…

Once I’ve answered the same question in three different emails, I figure it’s time to blog it. By that metric, I should have blogged this about 17 times over by now! Is VC-1 the same as Windows Media Video 9?Yes, the big picture: VC-1 is the SMPTE standardized version (SMPTE 421M) of Windows Media…

Rumor has it that ABC.com is going to be offering a 2 Mbps HD download service. I don't know about that rumor, but it sparked some conversations about what kind of quality can be delivered in 2 Mbps. Back again with Elephant's Dream, I took a whack at it. I hope y'all don't get sick of this source -…

There has been much discussion among HD DVD and BD enthusiast sites like AVS Forum about whether banding seen in some titles is due to the encoding process or the source. I can't speak for other codecs, but for VC-1, our codec does a great job of being accurate to the source, and so banding seen in…

So far, Alex Zambelli has had most of the SmoothHD.com fun while I was off on some other projects, but this time he was off on some other projects and I got to do an encode all myself. I figured this was as good a time as go through a hands-on project for Smooth Streaming. The SourceWe’ve had a few…

One of the best parts of my job at Microsoft is when I can put aside the video strategy stuff and do some real-world hands-on video compression encoding for a project. My friends on the IIS team asked me to encode their new tutorials for Silverlight playback, and I thought it was a great project to…

The newest in my "Silverlight Guru" interviews with Troy Dreier is up now. It offers a concise overview of some of the big features we have coming for Silverlight 3 and with our encoding infrastructure.http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268And the previous installments are…

Oh, I’m a bad, bad blogger. The Expression Encoder Service Pack 1 has been out for MONTHS, and and it’s cool enough that I haven’t had the time to do it full justice. Oh well, better short than nothing; I’ll just start off with the biggest new feature: multibitrate encoding, including support for…

Hello,We've just released a hotfix for Windows Media Encoder running under Vista. There's no need to install it under XP or other version of Windows. It addresses the following symptoms:Issue 1When you run the Windows Media Encoder command-line script WMCmd.vbs, the script host Cscript.exe may…