Silverlight Streaming won’t upload my video!

I’ve seen this issue a few times with people using the Manage Videos portion of Silverlight Streaming to directly upload a video file to be hosted.  Now with direct endpoints to the WMV files I’m seeing it a bit more.  Let me see if I can shed some light on this situation.

First, there is a distinction between uploading an application to Silverlight Streaming versus just a video.  What I’m going to discuss here is working with video only uploads.  If you didn’t know, you can directly upload just a video and Silverlight Streaming will host that file and create a Silverlight player experience for you as well (if you want it).

Okay, now on to the issue.  It is important to note that there are specific size limitations of videos with Silverlight Streaming services.  If you are trying to go beyond those size limitations your issue could be that right away.  The video file size must be smaller than 105MB.  Moving on…

Some of you may have attempted to upload a video and then directed to the page that shows the video processing and seen a “Video cannot be processed” message. 

Your issue could be related to what I’ll explain here.  It’s a bug.  We released the Silverlight Streaming transcoding (upload video turnkey only) service when Expression Encoder 2 was not yet released.  When Encoder 2 shipped, we realized that it wasn’t playing nice (the outputs rather) with the transcoding service.  We have to fix this and are working on it.  If you are taking a video source, running it through Expression Encoder 2 and then trying to upload that resulting video, you may be hitting this issue.

One thing to note, is that the “upload video” is a transcoding service.  So if you already have a VC-1 (or Silverlight capable) media format WMV, there really is no need to use the upload video portion.  You already have a high-quality encoded format and don’t need to transcode that again.  So how do you get it up there if this issue exists?  A few ways.

Option 1 – Upload an Application with a manifest

You can package the video file up with an application and use the Manage Applications functionality to upload that content.  You can use one of the Encoder templates if you’d like as well.  Even though you may not need the extra files, that is okay, because you can still have an endpoint to your WMV if that is what you want.  Since we don’t have the Silverlght Streaming Publish plug-in for Expression Encoder 2 complete yet (it is coming), here is a workaround on how to create those packages.

Option 2 – Upload the file direct with the API

While maybe not flexible for some, you can upload the file as an application directly using the API which doesn’t require a ZIP format for this purpose.  More information on the methods and API you would need can be found here.  The API is a WebDAV-based API for managing applications.

Option 3 – Name your WMV file to ‘video.wmv’ and upload as an application

Before you do any operation rename your file to ‘video.wmv’ and then go to the Manage Applications area of Silverlight Streaming.  Create a new application and give it a name, then in the next screen upload the ‘video.wmv’ file you just renamed.  After completion you can go to the Manage Videos section of the administration site and see your video.

We understand this may be a problem for some of you and are doing our best to address it as soon as possible.  Please note this is only an issue for Expression Encoder 2 file outputs that are attempting to be uploaded via the Silverlight Streaming transcoding service (aka Manage Videos) section.

Hope this helps!