Silverlight Video Upload Application
Sunday, March 30 2008
After doing a lot of digging around on the Internet about Microsoft's free silverlight hosting service I realized that it was quite complicated to use if you just wanted to host a video. It took me a long time to figure out that in fact it does support just hosting videos without the need for all the .js files and xaml. Here is a post from Tim Sneath with instructions on uploading a video. The method of video/application uploading described in Tim's post is used by Microsoft so that with every video you can embed some .js and xaml and then reference the hosting service in say an iFrame and it will pull down all the .js files and xaml you hosted with your video. This is cool and all but if you created you're own solution for defining your video player and .js files and you want to host this solution and only use videos from the Microsoft service then you don't want to have to go through all these steps for just hosting a video file.
Microsoft's service does allow for hosting just video's, but it's still kind of a complicated process and not well documented at this point. First you have to create a manifest.xml file and specify a dummy.xaml file. Then you have to zip this up with your video, create a new application on silverlight.live.com and upload your files to your new application.
I decided this was way to much work for just uploading a video. I was playing around with Vertigo's Video.Show and it provided a great example of how to upload video to silverlight.live.com. So inspired by video.show I created a little windows app to do the uploading for me. Here is how it works:
First, create an account on silverlight.live.com. Once your account is created you will need your Account ID and Account Key.
Fill out the account ID and account key in the uploader. When you click upload video it will create the manifest.xml file for you, grab the video you referenced, zip up the two files, create the application for you on silverlight.live.com, upload your zip, and then clean everything up from your local hard drive. Once the upload is complete in the Video Location text box you will be provided with the location of your newly uploaded video.
- Account ID: This is the account ID that you are provided with once you sign-up with the silverlight streaming service.
- Account Key: This is the account key that you are provided with once you sign-up with the silverlight streaming service.
- Video: This is the video file that you want to upload to the silverlight streaming service.
- Video Location: Once your upload completes this will display the streaming reference to your uploaded video.
You can download the uploader here. Please keep in mind this is just a little utility I created and it should be considered Alpha. Enjoy!
