Useful links:

iView Multimedia website:

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/

Expression Media website:

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

Expression Media forum:

http://social.expression.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/media/threads/ 

What's new in Expression Media 2?

Support of new file formats

Expression Media 2 now supports the Microsoft Office 2007/Mac Office 2008 file formats DOCX, DOTX, PPTX, POTX, XLSX and XLT.  On Windows, Expression Media 2 also now supports XAML, Expression Design, CSS, JS, and VBS file formats.

 

Shared Catalogs

New catalog locking enables multiple users to share a single catalog.  A single catalog can be opened and edited by one user, while others can access and view the same catalog.

 

Expression Media 2 now performs much more quickly across networks, and enables catalog locking so multiple users can access and view a catalog from a shared location while someone has it open and is editing it.

 

Updates to the Info and Organize panels

Each panel contains new menus in annotation fields that include options for sorting media items using either a union or an intersection of keywords.

 

Hierarchical keywords

With the new Keyword finder display in the Organize panel, you can create and view hierarchies of keywords for your media files.  For example, you can describe the properties of a photograph.  Instead of merely tagging your photograph "Europe," you can create a keyword hierarchy that specifies the country, the city, the street, and even the physical location of the scene (for example, "upstairs and to the right").  Or, instead of tagging a photograph "dogs," you can create a keyword hierarchy that specifies animals, mammals, and even specific breeds.  The Keyword finder gives you many options for clearly and accurately categorizing your media files.

 

Enhanced performance

Common tasks such as importing media, building catalogs, creating thumbnails and accessing networked file shares are now faster.  Also, smart importing functionality prevents corrupted files from hindering import.  Expression Media 2 will continue the import even when it encounters corrupt files and will report any problematic files once the import is complete.

 

Windows Live Virtual Earth positioning

Using Windows Live Virtual Earth technology, you can locate the origin of any photograph that includes GPS information. Expression Media 2 displays the location on a virtual world map.

 

Multi-monitor Light Table

You can increase your productivity by having the Light Table open on one monitor while your catalog and tools are open on another.  There's no longer a need to switch back and forth between views.

 

Changed QuickTime functionality (Windows only)

Although Expression Media 2 no longer requires that you have QuickTime installed, you will see a "QT" logo next to features that depend on QuickTime in order to run properly.  These include:

• Slideshow as movie
• Convert sound files
• Convert movie files
• Image rotate
• Image Editor
• PDF Maker

If you already have QuickTime installed, the "QT" logo will disappear and all features will work as expected.

 

Windows Imaging Components (Windows only)

If QuickTime is not installed, then Expression Media 2 uses the new WIC (Windows Imaging Component) for image encoding, decoding, and transformation, which are functions that QuickTime performed. For certain file types, you will need to install individual codecs.  For more information, go to Codecs for Windows.

You can still install QuickTime for extended file support.

 

Catalog media from storage devices using Autoplay (Windows only)

You can place your files in a catalog directly from portable storage devices, such as USB drives and flash memory cards.  When you insert storage devices that contain your media files, the resulting AutoPlay dialog box will offer you the choice of importing and cataloging those files immediately.

 

Quick Look support on Leopard (Mac only)

With Expression Media 2, you can use Quick Look to see thumbnails and previews of documents without opening the document in its original application.  You can preview media items that are in a catalog without having to open the catalog.

 

Uploader Utility

A new image uploader enables you to post your images to professional stock photo services such as Alamy, Corbis, Digital Railroad and Getty Images without leaving the Expression Media workspace.  <-- Note :  This hasn't been released yet but is going through final security reviews now and I expect it out within a few weeks.  It will be released as a set of separate downloadables.

xm2 catalogs are backwards-compatible with xm1 and iView MediaPro 3.

UPDATE, 18 April 08:  All of the international releases are now live on the Download Center with the exception of Korean on Windows (we're still awaiting the translated text for the web page).  Here are the links to the Windows builds:   

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

French

German

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Spanish

And here are the links to the Macintosh builds:

*Danish

*Finnish

French

German

Italian

Japanese

*Norwegian

Spanish

*Swedish

     * Pages are in English but the builds they are linked to are localized.

UPDATE, 18 April 08:  Happily, the Mac link, below, didn't have to change, though we've updated the payload to work better with Mac Auto-Update.  All's well.

UPDATE, 17 April 08:  We needed to pull the Mac download today due to an error in how we were handling Mac Auto-Update.  The fix is built and verified but not yet loaded to the Download Center.  I'll update you with a new link on Friday.  Apologies for the slip.

Morning, folks.  I'm happy to announce that an update that fixes the above-listed items is now available on the Microsoft Download Center for both Mac and Windows versions of Expression Media.  This is an update to xMedia SP1 (service pack 1) that we're calling a "roll-up" release.  Mac is here, Windows is here.

Many thanks to Nikon for the updated SDK that gives us D3 and D300 support!  We worked together getting that release ready to go for several months.  The short filenames (8.3 format) and duplicate folders issues that folks encountered when installing QuickTime 7.4 have been resolved.  And an old issue that's plagued international users with garbage characters in Custom Fields has also been resolved.

We'll have patches out on Mac Auto-Update and Microsoft Update soon.  We're shooting for next week on MAU and two weeks after that on MU.

I'd like to take a moment to praise the product team for getting this release done concurrent with our release work for xm2 (both the English and International releases are running hot-and-heavy right now).  Thank you, folks.

Everyone should take this update for the QuickTime fix even if the other fixes don't happen to be interesting to you.

Best wishes from cloudy Seattle.  Supposed to snow here this weekend.  Eighty-something here last weekend.  Wild.

In celebration of the announcement of Expression 2 at MIX'08, our marketing friends have stood up a whole new community site for Expression.

The Gallery section provides a spot for folks to contribute scripts or HTML Gallery templates or Silverlight Gallery templates (for xm2).  If you've got something you'd like to share with other xMedia users (maybe some iView scripts ported to xMedia?), this is a great place to do it!

Also included on the site is a much-improved forums interface.  Our Support team hangs out there quite a lot and the dev team pops by when we can spare a few minutes.

The iView forums are still alive and kicking, too.  Simon Street of iView is keeping things running for all the folks who hang there.  We're planning to close the iView web site after 30 June 08, but we'll keep the forums going.

Kudos to the Support team for putting together and maintaining this page of known issues with the beta:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xmediasupport/archive/2008/03/08/known-issues-with-expression-media-2-beta.aspx

UPDATE, 05 May:  The links to the betas are no longer active.

Hi, folks,

We've posted the beta for Expression Media 2.  Download your copy from here!

   Expression Media 2 Beta for Windows

   Expression Media 2 Beta for Mac

Bugs and comments go to xmbugs@microsoft.com, please.  That alias hits the inbox of several folks on the product development, marketing, and support teams.  The program managers will pre-sort all the incomings, then enter bugs for the unique reports and pass those along to the daily triage team who prioritizes and assigns the bugs.

Full disclosure:  It's unlikely that everything that's reported will be addressed in the initial release--timelines are a bit tight for that--but we'll review and evaluate everything that we hear from you.  We're planning a relatively quick follow-up release as a home for changes that don't make the initial release.

What's New in 2?

The download pages have a list of what's new in xMedia 2.  I'd like to talk about three other changes that didn't make that list.

Shared Catalogs.  Small workgroups, even just a couple folks, are becoming increasingly interested in asset management and collaborating with on their creative assets.  iVMP and xMedia 1 are a single-user products that allows one to send their catalog to someone else who can then read the catalog with iVMP or our free Reader.  That's a cool scenario, but it doesn't help enough in groups of people working together on creative content.

We've taken our first step in xm2 of improving the sharing model for catalogs.  Now, you can have a catalog file (an IVC) on a shared location and multiple folks can read the catalog simultaneously.  We'll only allow the first person in to edit the catalog, but everyone else can read and watch the changes.  This is the same multiple access model that Microsoft Office uses.

Increasing the level of sophistication and completeness around sharing creative assets will be a theme in future versions.

Stable Import.  You won't see this one as a bullet "on the box", but I think it's some of our most important work.  It's the culmination of work that Yan envisioned a couple years ago in London.  We've rewritten the way that import works.  Processing of the files is no longer done serially through the main application UI, but is now run from multiple background processes--for the geeks in the audience, we're off the main UI thread and and running # of cores + 1 processes for import.

There are several benefits of this approach.  First is that the main UI becomes more responsive (less frozen) during import.  Next is that we can take direct advantage of multiple-core machines to speed import processing (thumbnail extraction/creation, metadata extraction, etc.). 

Perhaps most important, though, is that a corrupted file that crashes the importer will no longer take down the app or destroy the catalog.  This has been the greatest vulnerability of both iVMP and xm1.  This approach also sets the stage for easier extensibility on importers, which will be important as we increase coverage on creative asset types in future versions.

Kudos to the team for this work.  Well done.

QuickTime on Windows.  The largest change on the Windows side (Mac folks can check out now ;-) is making QuickTime an optional component rather than a required one.  This is part of an overall strategy to push 3rd party components to the edge of the product, then create extension points that everyone will have access to.  This work is a big first step in that direction.

Users who don't have QuickTime installed will not get some of the functionality of users who do.  There's a lot of cool technology in QuickTime.  The biggest impact will be direct support for some of the file formats including conversion to/from those formats.  But you can get it all back; just install QuickTime.

Still a 2GB catalog limit.  Sorry.  I know this will upset several people, including some of our closest friends.  Even though a 2GB catalog can track roughly 200GB of photos, I know that's not enough for some advanced scenarios.

The truth is that we're planning to rework/recast the catalog dramatically over the next year.  The workgroup story that I told above fits into that.  Changing the catalog in both xm2 and again in xm3 would have broad impact on our entire customer base, so I chose to only make the change once, later.  Sorry, Peter...

It's still a good thing.  Pushing the fix on the 2GB limit was tough, but there's a lot of great work in reliability, performance (network perf is SO much better!), and some interesting and useful new features in xMedia 2.  I hope you'll give the beta a spin and let us know what you think.

Best wishes,
kb

Hi, folks,

We've been a bit quiet about this, but I'd like to be less quiet now. :)  If you're an iView MediaPro 3 user, and you haven't already done so, please upgrade to Expression Media.  We're extending the free upgrade period to 30 June 2008 (but that will REALLY be the end! ;-).

To upgrade, please go the iView web site (http://news.iview-multimedia.com/weblog.php) and follow the instructions.  It's easy and quick.  You just need to have already register, or register now.

Why is this so important?  Supportability.  We got lucky with Leopard and had very few OS-related issues (kudos to Douglas and Marek), but we have a couple.  QuickTime 7.1.4 has caused a larger issue to emerge with pathnames being converted to 8.3 format.  There's a work-around, but it's annoying.  The version of SDKs for RAW format handling aren't being kept up with the new cameras (some would argue we're not doing a great job of that with xMedia, either, but you can see my other blog post about that).

We're a small team and are focusing all our efforts now on xMedia.  That's where we can do our best work for you, so we'd very much appreciate folks getting current.

Best,
kb

UPDATE (19 March):  The SDK update looks good!  We'll integrate it into the xMedia 1 product code.  Then we need to add a fix to an issue uncovered by QuickTime 7.1.4 that converts paths to 8.3 format.  We're in the midst of the xMedia 2 release cycle so will get this work done and tested for release late in April.

UPDATE (07 March):  Received a fix to the Nikon SDK.  We'll try it out today.

Many apologies for my long absence.  Here's the first post in a more regular stream.

We've been asked (many times) what's up with D3 and D300 support in xMedia.  We don't reverse-engineer the NEF format (or any others, for that matter), so our timing for support is reliant on when the SDKs become available from the camera manufacturers.

In this particular case, we received an update from Nikon just last week (a fix was needed before we could ship).  While integrating that SDK we found another issue and are working with Nikon on a fix.

We need a quick fix to get the updated SDK into xm2.  We'll get the updated SDK into a refresh for xm1 sp1 as quickly as we can.

We're still looking at options, but at the moment it's unlikely that we can release a fix for iView MediaPro 3.1.3.  Sorry, but that code has gotten quite crufty over the past year-and-change.  xMedia is the code base that we can support.

Mac users on Leopard can specify the OS as the decoder and get good support for the D3 and D300, but there's no D3/D300 support released for Tiger (yet?).  We'll have full WIC support for RAW formats in xm2 and an update for xm1 based on the SDK.  I'll get dates to you as soon as we have them.

Cheers,
kb