While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.
I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.
However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I’m a database developer, not a designer.
Silverlight only displays WMV formats.
So my next idea was to point to Microsoft’s YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.
Then I looked at Yahoo… more flash videos.
Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.
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Hmm.It appears that Microsoft doesn’t Approve of the way you want to innovate.Sounds like Silverlight is pretty broken, if they didn’t realize that Flash Video "won" a long time ago.
On the other hand, the WMV encoding may just be the low hanging fruit. I haven’t paid a lot of attention so I don’t know, but perhaps that was just the first thing out the door and more formats will be possible in the future. (Go ahead, call me a Pollyanna…)
I like your blog entry.I also have my own ideas for creating my own rich internet application and am swimming through all of these incompatibility issues.I wish many things were more open source.
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