Sometimes the best possible way to visualize something really complex is to see it as a graphic and have it printed on a huge poster. Few years back in one of the Microsoft Mix event, they released this super cool visualization of an illustration of the process of launching a web site. It was released into a website as well called “A website named Desire”, which made the huge poster available as a SilverLight  Application using Deep Zoom. It is super cool, check it out.

(I saw this few years back and today I was trying to find it. Few hours of Google & Bing search, I couldn’t find it. Then with some help from a friend, I found it back. This shows how much more work has to be done in Web Search)

There are tons of cool stuffs for Silverlight 4 that are being shown in Day 2 keynote of PDC ‘09 and in the SL4 overview talk by Karen Corby. I am amazed at the speed in which the Silverlight team in Microsoft has been able to churn out releases at rapid pace – SL 1 in Nov ‘07, SL 2 in Oct ‘08, SL 3 in Jun ‘09 and SL 4 Beta in Oct ‘09.

The main features of Silverlight 4 that caught my attention are:

1. Access to Webcam, Microphone and other devices like Digital Camera
2. Print Preview and direct Print support
3. UDP Multicast, very useful for organization wide network distribution of live video
4. Authorization support in client HTTP Stack (NTLM, Basic and Digest)
5. Same .NET compiled code runs in SL 4 and .NET 4
6. Offline DRM play support
7. Drag/Drop, Clipboard support
8. Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction
9. Embed a HTML control including a Flash control inside that HTML, all usable from Brush
10. Styles support
11. RichtextArea control and better internalization text support

I am working on uploading to our publishing house web site several of the interviews we made in connection with my grandfather Sri Krishnaswamy Sarma's centenary. Initially I went with uploading the videos to Google Videos, but several users complained of heavy buffering of videos even on broadband connection. YouTube and MSN Videos were not valid options as they limit the videos to 100MB Filesize & 10Minutes in length, but our videos were larger than that. After several trials I have settled with using Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 to convert the DVD Video to Flash Video (FLV) format, upload it our web site and serve it with JWPlayer. With this arrangement the videos seem to play out smoothly.

When importing the DVD to Premiere Elements I wanted to have the project format as the same one in which the video was made. When I searched I found no way to determine this automatically, eventually I found a way. It was to open the DVD with Nero ShowTime and select the option "Show Additional Info on OSD". This displays information about the current video that is played (like the one below):

Still this doesn't say whether the DVD Video was in PAL or NTSC. It turns out that you can figure this from the above displayed information:

• If the frame is 720x480, video is NTSC; if it's 720x576, it's PAL
• Frame rate for PAL is 25 fps; NTSC is 29.97 (aka "30 drop")