Silverlight Video + Camtasia = Tricky... but doable. The goal of this exercise was to find the best way to create a Silverlight version of
dnrTV using the
Microsoft Expression Media Encoder. I'm not going to make this a long-winded post with no meat, so let's get right to the settings to make
Camtasia videos look good in Silverlight. For this test I used a WMV video created with Camtasia Studio 4 as the source video. It's 1024x768 recorded at 5 frames per second, with mp3 encoded audio.
I experimented with different codecs, and basically decided that the
WMV Web Server Broadband codec was the lowest I could go without the video looking blotchy. The higher bandwidth codecs really didn't add quality to the image, only file size.
By far, the most important setting in Expression Media Encoder is the
Video Complexity.
Turn it off! A complex video is one that moves fast. Screens move slowly. Get it? This might be counter-intuitive, but turn it off if you want a good screen video in Silverlight.
The next thing I had to do was to
Uncheck "Lock to Profile" in the Video Size area. I had to put in 1024x768 to force it to output at the native resolution.
Finally in the
Output tab, you can pick a template for the look-and feel of the video player. I found that all of the templates except for the
Clean Template take up too much screen real estate for a 1024x768 video, but that's just me. I like the Clean Template because its very... well... clean! Only a pop-up navigator at the bottom of the screen.
The video clip I rendered for this demo came out to just over 2 MB per minute... so you can guestimate about 220MB for an hour's worth of video. Is that too big? We'll find out.
Meantime, check out the demo clip from Peter Blum's first dnrTV episode, #75.