Wpf Wonderland

Stating the problem

I need a place to store my streaming media files.   I used the Silverlight streaming site for awhile, but Microsoft Azure came along and killed off the site.   Azure is a more general purpose application hosting service than the Silverlight streaming offering and provides many more services so this is a logical move by Microsoft. But regardless of whether it was a logical decision it leaves many people, including me,  with a need to find a new location to store their media files.

Choosing an alternate

The logical first choice, if you are comfortable with Microsoft technologies, is to move to Azure. 

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters.

Azure is very capable of storing my files.  But it can also do a lot more.  I considered using Azure, and looked at the pricing model.  In the end, I decide not to use Azure for my media files.  I’m not through evaluating Azure however,  I have some other projects coming later this year where Azure is a perfect fit.

Video Hosting sites

The obvious next step was to look at YouTube and other video hosting sites.  YouTube is ubiquitous and easy to use.   Vimeo is another practical video hosting site, which give you the option of allowing the user the ability to download the video file.  Both sites have their own embeddable video player, and provide detailed statistics about  the number of people viewing your videos. But in the end I opted to try something new.  I decided to use Dropbox.com as the media server.

Dropbox as friendly front-end for the Cloud

Seems like lots of people love Dropbox.com and it’s easy to see why.  It’s easy to setup, and it just works. 

Dropbox lets you create a folder on your computer. Drop anything in the folder and almost instantly it’s backed up to the web. Make a change to a document? BAM, backed up. Can’t get to your computer? Go to www.getdropbox.com or to the free iPhone app and you’ve got access to all your files, to share, email, or delete them. One of the best things about Dropbox is that it’s seamless. Once you’ve installed and setup Dropbox, you won’t even know it’s running. Anything you drop, change or save in the dropbox folder automatically gets synched to the web. You’ll never have to worry whether you backed something up, or what to do if you left your computer at home. – Link

At its heart DropBox is a file backup application.  All you have to do is install the Dropbox desktop application and copy files to the MyDropbox folder. They are instantly backed up to the dropbox servers. DropBox also excels at file synchronization. The Dropbox application will automatically sync to the Dropbox website and any other computer(s) linked to your account as soon as it notices a change in your Dropbox folder.   What appealed to me was the simplicity of uploading the files to the Dropbox server.  Just create a public folder  on the site and copy my media files to the correct public folder on my hard drive.  

Prerequisites for streaming Silverlight from Dropbox.com

For the best performance of your streaming media your video content should be saved in a stream friendly format.  I use Expression Encoder for that purpose. 

Setting up Dropbox

This is staggeringly easy to do.  Download the installer file from the Dropbox.com website and install on your local computer.

Figure 1 – Download button on DropBox site

On my computer the install only took a couple minutes to finish.  Next you need to setup a user account for the site.  This can be done on the website, or from the the local Dropbox application.  Once you have the account configured you can start using the MyDropBox folder.  It’s simple to add folder and files.   You can create private folders, but in my case I need to have the video files in a public folder so they can be accessed freely via a public URL.

Figure 2 – Public folder in MyDropbox.

As soon as the files are copied to the Public folder the DropBox application starts the sync process. This takes a few seconds, with the overall speed determined by the file size.  Once the file is in the folder you can right click the file and get the public URL from the Dropbox/Copy Public Link menu.

Figure 3 – Use Copy Public Link menu

Once you have the link you can easily use it in your Silverlight application.

<MediaElement Source="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5070335/ShazzamOverview-v1.wmv" />

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