Publishing Adaptive Streaming Video from Expression Encoder to Windows Azure Blobs

I’ve just released a new drop of Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs Uploader on Code Gallery, which includes publishing plug-ins for Expression Encoder 3 and 4 that pushes your Smooth Streaming content directly to Windows Azure Blobs.

For background on the technique and the tool, please read last week’s post “Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs and CDN.”

See it in Action

The following 2-minute video shows the Expression Encoder plug-in in action:

Detailed Walkthrough

To use the plug-in, download the binary drop from Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs Uploader on Code Gallery, and run EncoderPlugin\install.cmd from an elevated command prompt.

Once the plugin is installed, go to Expression Encoder and set up an encode job to use one of the IIS Smooth Streaming presets.

If you want a prepackaged Smooth Streaming player with your content, choose a template in the Job Output area.  You might want to uncheck “Preview in browser,” because the publishing plug-in also includes an option to launch the browser once publishing is complete.

Finally, you can choose the “Windows Azure Adaptive Streaming Publisher” option in the Publish area to invoke the plug-in.  You’ll need to provide your Windows Azure storage account name and key, as well as a full path to where you would like the video published (at least a container name, but possibly also a path under that container).

If you’ve checked “make blob container public,” the container will automatically be set for full read access permissions, and you’ll also have the option of launching the browser when the publish is finished.

Although the Encoder plug-in is based on the same library as the command-line tool, it contains only a small subset of options. If you’re looking for more fine-grained control over things like number of upload threads or cache policies, you’ll need to use the command-line tool (which can be downloaded from the same project).

Download

You can download the Expression Encoder plug-in, the command-line tool, and the full source code at the “Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs Uploader” project on Code Gallery.

[UPDATE 3:34pm PDT] Added support for Expression Encoder 4 in addition to Encoder 3.