Expression Encoder 4 SP1 released!

Today we have released a service pack for Expression Encoder 4 that includes some new features and a bunch of bug fixes.  Here is a list of the new features we have added:

 

  • GPU encoding - If you have an NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated GPU board in your system, you can now take advantage of the additional processors to speed up encoding time or squeeze more live streams into your broadcasts.  Check out Eric Juteau's white paper for all the details.
  • Screen capture as a live source - Now you can select the screen as a device in Live projects to stream or archive.  
  • Live templates - Before if you wanted to use the Expression Encoder templates, you needed to hand edit the template to point to your live source.  Now you can generate the template directly from the Live project and we will hook up all the links.  The workflow is slightly different than on-demand templates.  Since these templates usually need to be live before you start broadcasting, you will need to generate the files manually beforehand.  Once you have selected your output type, the Generate button will enable on the Templates panel where you can manually create the files or upload them to a WebDAV enabled server.  If the panel doesn't appear after upgrade, you can find it on the Windows menu.
  • Live Push/Pull - Now you can broadcast and publish to a Windows Media Services publish point at the same time.
  • Improved De-interlacing Options - We have added a new de-interlacing option called 'Selective Blend' which provides a higher quality picture without the high CPU requirements of Pixel Adaptive.  We have also exposed this and the other de-interlacing options in live.
  • Import script commands - Both in live (no timing) and on-demand, you can now import multiple captioning formats (ISMT, DFXP, SRT, XML, SAMI, SUB, TXT) to the Script Command panel.  This allows you to pre-propagate your captions in live from a script or do some basic editing of your scripts before encoding.  If you do not have a caption file for you encode or broadcast, you can now easily create a 'return-delimited' TXT file with your captions to import in either project type as well.
  • DRM Content Key - If you PlayReady license server supports Content Key encryption, we now allow you to specify this key instead of a Key Seed to enable individual keys per item.
  • HE-AAC - We have added both Version 1 and Version 2 of the HE-AAC codec to allow encoding for supported devices.
  • New Windows Phone 7 presets - Now that the WIndows Phone 7 is out (they rock!), we have created presets to enable direct playback (WMV, MP4) or creating video to use in a Smooth Streaming application using the Silverlight Media Framework phone template.

 

Check it out and let us know what you think!  Thanks

 

Jamie

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2011
    This is great news - a lot of welcome improvements in this release. However, I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask about a missing feature. A few years back, when Encoder 2.0 was in beta, I suggested that you add the ability to use the various "macros" such as {Original file name} and {Default extension} in the Job Output panel, not only in the Media File Name field, but also in the Directory field. This small improvement would make Encoder extremely handy for converting large collections of media and having them output in a structure based on their metadata. The response from the team was that this was a good idea, and that it would be added to the feature list of coming releases. I've been looking for it in every release of Expression Encoder since then, but it never materialized. How come?

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2011
    It is unfortunate that Intel Quick Sync Video is not supported...

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2011
    Is the SP for EE 4 Pro as well or for EE 4 only?

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2011
    Will GPU-encoding be available for ATI Stream technology on ATI GPUs in a future update for EE 4?

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2011
    Editing clips is easy in encoder except when you want to also edit video overlay.  Am I missing a single setting that lets me edit the video overlay with the primary content?

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2011
    I have just created a project by adding 4 media (video clips) to the timeline using the "insert media at the end of the timeline" button. I then added a crop in the enhance tab. However, in the output video, the crop was applied to the first video clip only. The other 3/4 of the output video were not cropped. Is this a feature I can disable?