How to Retrieve Files from Silverlight Streaming (SLS) and Post to Windows Azure
This article is now of historical interest only since the SLS service is no longer available.
In this post, I will provide step-by-step instructions for retrieving videos and Silverlight applications that you had previously hosted on the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta, which is being discontinued.
1. Connect to your SLS site by going to https://silverlight.live.com
2. Login with your Windows Live ID. You should see a screen like this one:
3. Click on Manage Account. Keep this window open because you will need the Account ID and the Account Key.You should see the following:
4. Now you need to attach the SLS service so that it can be accessed like a drive. First, go to the Start button and select Computer. You will see:
5. Click on Map network drive. You will see a dialogue box like this one:
In the Folder field, enter the following:
<AccountID> should be replaced by the Account ID displayed in step 3 above.
Make sure that the Connect using different credentials box is checked and then click Next.
6. You should see the following Windows Security dialogue box:
In the User name field, enter the same Account ID that you entered in step c above.
In the Password field, enter the Account Key that was displayed in step 3 above.
Important note: if you select the Account Key that was displayed in step 3 above by double clicking on it and copying it to the clipboard, there’s a very good chance that what you’ve copied will include a trailing whitespace. Verify this by pasting it into a visible text field somewhere (e.g. browser address bar). You do not want there to be a trailing whitespace or the authentication in this step will fail.
Check the Remember my credentials box if you like and click OK.
7. Assuming all went well, you should now see a file window that looks something like this:
These files represent all the content that you have stored in your SLS account.
8. Anything that you want to save should be copied locally. It is probably easiest to create a folder on your Desktop, open it, and drag the folders that you want to keep from the SLS drive to your local folder. For this example, I will just copy across the mixlogo folder.
9. Open the local copy of the folder you just copied. In my case, its contents look like this:
There are quite a few files here, but we only care about the media file, which is called mixlogomotion.wmv. Note that if you had used the Upload video feature in the SLS web interface, your folder may simply contain the WMV file and nothing else.
10. Now you have the media file stored locally. The easiest way to get this file up on Azure is to re-encode using Expression Encoder by following the steps in this post. Note that you can use the Apply Source Encoding Settings presets in Encoder if you’re happy with the compression do not wish to transcode.