Ive seen some of the starter videos for the MediaPlayer SL control...and they change the skins pretty easily. I just created a new ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Web Site and dropped a MediaPlayer control on my web form, but the Player Skins smarttab only has the ellipse to browse, and no drop down like the tutorials to choose pre-shipped skins. Is the SL2 SDK not coming with these skins or am I missing something?

Thanks

Hi Spinz,

Those videos were showing a pre-release version of our product, and we've made a few design changes since then.

It should still be pretty easy to set the MediaPlayer's skin, though, by using the "Import Skin..." command on the MediaPlayer's smart tasks panel.  The SDK does install a small number of skins, and that command allows you to import one of them to your web site and sets it as the MediaPlayer's MediaSkinSource property value.

HTH,
Clay

Clay...thanks for that....I didnt notice that before! In the tutorials that link was used to save the xaml so that you can modify it...i happened to look over it.

I have another design question, I am using the SL MediaPlayer as my media player for a web app that users can upload video files. Now, I dont want to limit my users to only upload WMV files...but Im wondering if there is a way to encode the video automatically to WMV post upload of the file (cause it seems that the SL media player only plays a handful of formats). I am also wondering if WMV is the best format for saving the videos as I really dont want to eat up my server space, I am not toooo concerned about quality. I have heard of VC1..is that a better compression format in terms of leveraging space? How would I go about automatically encoding in these formats once the users have uploaded the videos?

Thanks.

I'm not an encoding expert, but you can use the Expression Encoder tool for encoding videos. I believe it supports a command line interface, which allow you to encode videos on the fly from the server side with a background service, scheduled task, or direct execution using some shell API. There may be .net components out there that would allow you to directly encode videos but I don't know of one -- but either way it should probably be a background task separate from the user's request since it can be a lengthy process. It's also pretty intensive on the CPU so keep in mind unless you impose some upload limits you could be opening your site to some severe bombardment.

You might want to post over on the Silverlight forums and see what you get over there.