Or, when you’re finished with the movie and ready to publish, check the box to output to Silverlight, maybe pick from one of several template for the XAML player, and push the Publish button. You can record them all using the usual tools, output to WMV or something similar, and then open up Expression Media to convert it to a Silverlight format, write your own XAML player, and finally add it to your page. So you decide you want to enhance your blog and/or articles with some screencasts.

NET developer and Camtasia user, and you see (in 12–24 months) that Silverlight is gaining some adoption and most of your audience (.NET developers) have it installed. She suggested I blog it so that TechSmith could gauge how much community support there would be for this feature.

I asked Betsy if they were working on a Silverlight output for Camtasia’s movies, and she said they’d had a few requests for that feature, but they hadn’t fully decided when that might be added. Camtasia today supports a wide variety of output formats and codecs, one of which is a Flash/SWF format. While here at TechEd, I also had the opportunity to talk to Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist for TechSmith, makers of the most excellent Camtasia desktop-capture movie software. And of course I think the two will merge, so that many text-only articles wil include a video with a brief interview, overview of some interesting code, or demos. I predict (and this is happening regardless of Silverlight so it’s an easy one) that we will continue to see more and more video presentation of technical content in the next few years, until it rivals and perhaps even surpasses text-only online articles.

The flexibility and customization options that are available to construct branded and unique video player controls with these tools is really quite amazing, considering how small the download is and the fact that they run on IE, FireFox and Safari/Mac.

Some (OK, nearly ALL) of the Silverlight demos shown lately at TechEdand MIX involve hosting videos.

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