Online Video Production

Over the long weekend I made some excellent progress in my online video production work. I managed to significantly improve the quality of my YouTube videos and I explored Microsoft Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming.

I found some excellent tips on how to improve the quality of my videos for YouTube on the WordPress blog of Kevin Nalts. Nalts is one of the major vloggers on YouTube. He is very popular in the community because his videos are really funny and often clever. He is a marketing professional and does not try to hide it. That should have really worked against him because the community does not like corporate marketing but Nalts manages to get away with it. Nalts really knows what he is doing so I've found it a good idea to follow his lead. For example, I bought a similar camcorder to the one he sold on eBay, the Panasonic PVGS120 MiniDV Camcorder with 3CCD, and this proved to be an excellent camcorder that can handle any lighting conditions unlike my cheap SONY HandyCam.

I put some more time into studying the Video.Show open sourced web application for online video sharing. First, I looked into how it was using Microsoft Expression Encoder. I examined the XML job file and saw that it uses a template that ships with Microsoft Expression Encoder. I created my own job to see how changing the output settings would modify this XML file. I discovered that Microsoft Expression Encoder can actually output an entire Silverlight application including a video player for your video. This doesn't leave anything for the programmer to do! There was even a Visual C# project file. Microsoft Expression Encoder has several templates so I don't see much point in trying to roll your own video player.

Next I turned my attention to the Silverlight Streaming video hosting service. My account did not list any videos so I uploaded one of my vacation videos. It gave me the HTML for an iframe but I noted the web address of the WMV video file and plugged that into the mediaUrl in the StartPlayer.js file of the Silverlight application created by Microsoft Expression Encoder. This converted the local video source into a hosted streaming media source. I then customized the web page for my web site and changed the background color of the canvas. (I was going to link to this page on my web site but now it cannot find the media file for some reason).

Next weekend I'll try to spend more time on Video.Show. I need to determine how to log encoding and upload errors and look into replacing the encoding application with an open source alternative, VLC or MediaCoder.