Introducing Video.Show: A Silverlight Reference-quality Sample

imageOne of the favorite things about my job is being able to share really cool new content with you all, and so today is a good day to end the week on! Since we completed the Family.Show WPF reference sample, we've been working away in partnership with a great developer team from Vertigo Software on a Silverlight video scenario, and today is the day when we get to open it up to the developer community in the form of a first public beta.

Video.Show is an end-to-end solution that provides a reference-quality sample for user-generated video content sites. Taking advantage of all of our latest technologies: .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ, Silverlight, Expression Encoder and imageSilverlight Streaming, Video.Show provides support for uploading, encoding, tagging, viewing and commenting on videos. Since not many people are building video sites like YouTube that have millions of videos, we've optimized the experience for sites with tens to thousands of videos.

The version published today is a beta release; we've still got a few minor tweaks ahead of us before we're ready to call this final. Nevertheless, if you're interested in using Silverlight to build out a video site, it's a great starting point. The screenshots on the right-hand side of the post give you a quick idea of the capabilities of this application. Here's a short feature list:

  • imageVideo wall for browsing videos. Hover the mouse over any individual video to see an instant thumbnail preview.
  • Time marker-based comment system. Pause the video at an interesting moment and add your comment, and it will appear as that frame is displayed on playback.
  • Site membership using ASP.NET. Sign in and create a custom profile; favorite, tag and upload videos.
  • First-time experience for a user without Silverlight installed demonstrates best practices for detection and installation.
  • Web services for retrieving video catalogs, tagging and favorites.
  • Background batch processing task that handles the encoding of videos using Expression Encoder and uploads to Silverlight Streaming.

We'll continue to extend this solution over the next couple of months and eventually merge it into the Software + Services Blueprints initiative that was announced at TechEd Developer in Barcelona last week. But for now, we'd love you to download it and try it on your machine; give us feedback on what you like and don't like about it so we can improve it for future releases. At this point in time, the solution is available in source code form, but by the time we release we'll have a live production site in place where you can visit to see the site in a real-world setting. Since it's licensed under the Microsoft Public License, maybe one of you will have a live site using it even before we do!

Download Video.Show here from CodePlex. Have a great weekend!