Top 10 Questions about Silverlight and Media

Finally coming up for air now after 10 hours of press briefings for nearly three days, I can finally talk more here about Silverlight:

Top 10 Questions About Silverlight and Media

1. What media formats do you support?
   A: WMV7,8, 9/SMPTE VC-1, WMA, MP3
2. What is SMPTE VC-1?
   A: WMV9 - now an open standard recognzied by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and shipping in all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives.
3. Will Silverlight work with my current Windows Media?
   A: Yes, it most definitely will work with your existing Windows Media
4. What do I have to do to add Silverlight to my site? For Mac and Windows playback?
   A: Once the beta ships in two weeks, all you'll have to do is drop a little .js and XML into your page and away you go.
5. Can additional formats be added for playback?
   A: No, part of the appeal of Silverlight is the small package size- 1MB, includes everything it needs for video and audio, animation, graphics and AJAX-based programmability to boot!
6. What companies are supporting Silverlight?
   A: Major League Baseball, Brightcove, NetFlix, Frog Design, AvenueA/Razorfish, Akamai, and many others are among the names announced.
7. How easy the install really going to be?
   A: How does 3 clicks sound for XP users? Vista users have one more click by default due to the user account feature. Web pages can be wired up to do in-line install and auto-refresh after you're done.
8. Can you really do 720p HD video? What 3D video card do I need?
   A: Definitely. About a 3ghz P4 class processor will work, regardless of video card. We've done some really neat processor optimizations. All the demos shown in the booth at NAB were run off a mid-range laptop.
9. Why does resizing/scaling of apps "snap" differently in Safari/FireFox/IE?
   A: It all depends upon the way the browser renders. I won't make any qualitative comment as your mileage may vary.
10. Will Silverlight work with my existing web server? What about live streaming?
    A: For on-demand, yes! Run it on Darwin, Apache, whatever you're running. Of course, you'll get a few added benefits with Windows Media streaming- reduced bandwidth costs, faster seeking, etc.
11. Where can I learn more?
    A: Right now you can learn more at www.microsoft.com/silverlight. The community site will go live at www.silverlight.net. The Beta "Cruise" starts on April 30th.
    

HD Photo Preview

Last week at PMA, Microsoft formally announced HD Photo. For more information on HD Photo, head over to Bill Crow’s blog. The official press release can be found here. Here’s a summary of the important details:

• Microsoft is announcing HD Photo, a new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• The HD Photo Device Porting Kit, used to implement HD Photo in devices and other platforms
• Royalty free licensing
• A free set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, developed in conjunction with Adobe
• Microsoft is committed to standardizing the HD Photo technology

HD Photo overview & details:

• A new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• Key benefits include:
• Better Image Fidelity: Preserving all the original image content, enabling the highest quality exposure and color adjustments
• State of the art compression: Up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts, and scalable to lossless
• Powerful Features: Decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or manipulate the image as compressed data
• Technical Details
• Support for the Widest Range of Pixel Formats
• High Performance, Low Footprint Algorithm
• Advanced Decoding and Transformation Operations
• Better image quality in a file that is up to ½ the size of JPEG
• Lossless and lossy compression with the same algorithm
• Lossy compression is much less destructive than JPEG
• An efficient, portable photo interchange format that preserves the entire dynamic range
• HD Photo Support in Microsoft products:
• Windows Vista in-box support
• Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 support via Windows Imaging Component (WIC), a free download
• Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
• HD Photo Device Porting Kit
• NET Framework 3.0
• XML Paper Specification (XPS) – The XPS format utilizes the HD Photo format to store image data
• Photo Info Power Toy
• Microsoft Expression Family
• HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop

from
Microsoft Photography Blog

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 C++ compatibility issues

C++ team did it again and moved the limits, VC++ 2005 SP1 is crap.

For the people that need to use it, whatever the pervert reason, after installing SP1 and compiling projects with it, it won't run on client machines until applying patch with new redistributes.

Seek you folder for new version:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\vcredist_x86

And deploy it on client machines.

WM Photo becomes HD Photo

Microsoft have changed name of new Windows Media Photo format, and introduced new name with new initiative of creating open standard successor for JPEG image format.

The main idea is overcoming crucial color space and color range problem of JPEG image format but also improving other important aspects like format performance and ease of hardware implementation, which is very important for camera manufacturers.

More about HD Photo

Video Inspector - Codec Info

If you're are unsure what codec some file is using, try Video Inspector.

DirectShow Filter Manager

Great free utility.
http://www.softella.com/dsfm/index.en.htm

WM ASF Reader Alternative

Source code for a WMV/WMA ASF file parser filter that connects to the standard File Source (Async). Supports seeking and set-rate, using the Windows Media Format SDK.

http://www.gdcl.co.uk/downloads.htm#WMFDemux