Rugby Video and the Web

With the first All Black team of the year being named this afternoon I thought it was quite fitting to do a rugby post. 

Last week I was working with the team from SiliconCoach in Dunedin helping test their new Rugby Sportswizard application. The application is really sweet in its approach and design, it has a bunch of video parcels that have been shot of the All Blacks during their conditioning period. What you can then do is load a video of yourself performing the same action as your favourite all black and then "compare" how you went and improve your technique.

Now a desktop application is the logical choice for performing this sort of video analysis especially because you are able to use the application offline and leverage the clients graphics card.

In contrast a website that caught my eye last week was https://www.visarugby.co.nz/. This ASP .NET website uses a flash UI (they use Zinzan as their kiwi rugby personality... hopefully his recent injuries are not life threatening) to perform in page video editing of rugby moves to submit to a community portal.

There is still quite a gap between what can be done on the client and what can be done on the web. I thought I would take a moment to "make a video" that profiles these two solutions and takes a bit more about where we are heading with Silverlight as a solution for video on the web.

Video encoded with Expression Media Encoder and uploaded to the Silverlight Streaming Service  (unfortunatley the screen capture software doesn't record the video smoothly but you'll get the idea).

I took the Top Banana in browser video editing application for a run on my laptop this week and it is really slick! I look forward to that code being released shortly.

If you are interested in learning more about Silverlight video for the web...

The 101 for media control in javascript is here
A sample site (with source code) that Joe Stegman has used to incorporate Silverlight Video into his site is here - video here.

You can also watch these other MIX sessions on media in Silverlight

Deep Dive on Silverlight Media Integration
Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with Silverlight
Windows Media: Evolving Content, Powering Amazing User Experiences

Also don't forget the all black vista sidebar gadget!

Enjoy