14 DAY TRIAL // Users of both Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Encoder 4 Pro can upgrade their respective versions of the Expression component with the first Service Pack release. Microsoft launched Expression Encoder 4 SP1 RTM at the end of January 2011, allowing customers to extend feature support, but also deploy updates as well as stability enhancements for their solution.
It’s important to note that the plain vanilla Expression Encoder 4, that is available free of charge, does not contain advanced features which were reserved for the professional version of the tool, including GPU Encoding, Caption Updates, DRM Content Key, and HE-AAC Codec.
In fact, Service Pack 1 for Expression Encoder 4 brings to the table a range of enhancements, such as Live Template Support, Live Screen Capture, Caption Updates, improved De-interlacing Options, DRM Content Key, HE-AAC Codec, Live Push/Pull, and new Windows Phone 7 Presets.
Microsoft choose to highlight one enhancement ahead of all else, namely GPU encoding. Essentially, the software giant has added support for NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated GPUs.
What this means is that with Expression Encoder 4 SP1 RTM, customers can not only accelerate the encoding process by offloading some of the workload to the graphics processor, but they can also pack more streams into their broadcasts.
The Redmond company’s Jamie Lang detailed some of the additional changes in Expression Encoder 4 SP1 RTM:
“•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.
•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.
•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, 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.”
Expression Encoder 4 SP1 RTM is available for download here.