Microsoft® Media Encoder™ in 5 minutes or less

Expression Media Encoder is a Microsoft tool in the Microsoft Expression Suite of tools specifically designed to take media content and either tanscode/encode it or produce in a form that can be consumed online in the form of some kind of Silverlight media player and WMV and to integration with Silverlight Streaming services. Expression media encoder has a number of built in templates for use in quickly building Silverlight media players. Once you get the application up and running, and you stare at it for a few minutes to get oriented it is pretty straight forward.

From the initial screen we need to import our media file. Go to the file menu and select import, navigate to the video file you want and selection ‘open’. Next we need to select a template which you can do by selecting output and then under the section ‘Job Output’ select one of the templates. You should see a shot from your video in the main area.

Now just click the button in the middle on the bottom and Encoder will go to town. Now this is all good and Media encoder has a bunch of other features around setting up markers and the like but the really key thing is that it gets video content into a nice format that Silverlight can consume.

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media