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Smart Enconding Enables Content Reuse

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As I work with many customers from the media and entertainment sector which naturally have a high affinity to Windows Media Center and Silverlight technologies I'm frequently asked the question on where the overlaps are between Media Center and Silverlight when it comes to supported Video and Audio formats. And this question is obvious as it directly impacts the cost of content preparation for those customers that want to target both technical platforms. So I took some time and scanned the documentation and infos available from the product teams in order to give a short overview on the formats supported and where the overlaps are which you can leverage in order to do one proper encoding for both platforms. I won't touch all the profiles and combinations of Audio & Video since there are quite a few but I try to give you a basic overview which help you focus down on a few potential target encodings on which to base your final tests, which you should do in either case.

So to start with Silverlight and Media Center do support Windows Media Video Versions 7,8 and 9(VC-1). With respect to the last both also support up to 1080p formats which is rarely mentioned especially in the context of Silverlight as it would take quite a beefy machine in order to display such content with acceptable performance not to speak of the bandwith requirements. Interlaced formats which are also part of the Windows Media Specification are not supported in neither Silverlight nor Media Center. Besides WMV Media Center also supports MPEG-2 playback which is only natural as MCE is a platform where DVD playback is a core feature. So as you can see there are not many differences between Silverlight and Media Center which gives you quite some freedom wo choose the right format for your application.
With respect to Audio there are slightly more differences but still there's enough overlap to find a good combination. Silverlight basically supports:

  • WMA 7,8,9  in all constant (CBR) and variable bitrates (VBR) available today
  • MP3  in all CBRs and VBRs

However there are a few minor WMA formats or codecs which are not supported at the moment and those are:

  • WMA Lossless
  • WMA Professional
  • WMA Voice
  • WAV-PCM

Windows Media Center in addition does support WMA Lossless and WAV-PCM of course.

So for a good start for your target encodings look at the VC-1 Main and Advanced Profiles with the respective audio profiles.

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