By now you’ve already seen how quick and easy it is to make and share a movie using Windows Live Movie Maker.  So instead of showing you how to post a video to an online service, I thought I’d discuss an alternative way of sharing your content using Movie Maker, Windows 7, and Xbox 360.  With so many great web services available to stay in touch and exchange media with friends and family, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the most enjoyable form of consuming your own content is to sit down with the people you care about and flip through an album or watch a home movie on the television.  But how do you get your Windows Live Movie Maker creation up on the big screen?  Well, you could always hook up a PC to your TV or burn a physical DVD, but let’s try something a little more “on-demand” than that.

I’m an avid climber and I love taking photos up in the mountains, but sometimes the grandeur of the scenery is lost when I show people my photos and videos on a laptop screen or share them through a web service. Instead, I’ll put my movie together in Movie Maker and display it on the TV by streaming through my Xbox 360.  This way, when I have friends and family over, we don’t all have to huddle around the computer screen – we can sit back with a snack and share the experience. 

Keep in mind, this post assumes a few things;

1. You’re running Windows 7 on your PC.

2. You have an Xbox.

3. You have a home network set up.

If you’re running Windows Vista, you should be able to accomplish the same result. Click here for information on streaming using Windows Vista. With that said, here’s how I do it on Windows 7.

First, I need to make a movie. I want to put together a slideshow combining photos and short video clips I took during the climb with an awesome soundtrack.  I’ll start in Windows Live Photo Gallery, where I can see all of my content.  I’ll select all of the photos and videos I want to use, click on the ‘Make’ button, then select ‘Make a movie…’ to launch Windows Live Movie Maker.  I’m going to use AutoMovie to quickly compile my content into a polished movie.  Then, I output my movie using our 1080p profile for maximum resolution and maximum viewing experience.  I save the movie to my local hard drive in a folder that is part of my Videos library.  I have this library set up so that its contents can be streamed to other devices on my home network.  Here’s how you can do this:

First, click the start button icon in the lower left of the toolbar. In the Windows 7 Start Menu search box, type “media streaming” as follows:

Launch ‘Media streaming options’ and you’ll see this:

Turn on media streaming, and you’ll get the following options:

Be sure to name your media library, which by default will be the name of your computer.  That’s all there is to it!  You can customize the settings if you like, but as is, anything in your Pictures, Videos, or Music Libraries will be visible to other media-streaming-capable machines on your network, including your Xbox 360.

Now that my movie has been saved and my media streaming options are set up, I turn on my Xbox 360.  Under the ‘My Xbox’ heading, I navigate to my ‘Video Library’ and select it.  At this point, I’m asked to select my source.  My Xbox sees my computer as a source and lists it as an option, so I’ll scroll down and select it.  Once I’ve done that, I can navigate by folder and find the movie I just created.

And that’s it, I can control playback straight through my Xbox and watch the movie with friends right in my family room.  The great thing about this is that you only have to set up media streaming once.  After that, anytime you save a movie on your computer, it will be visible to your Xbox so it’s ready to go whenever you want to watch it on your TV!

On a similar note, since we live in such a digitally connected world, I get my friends asking me to share my movies online so they can watch it again later.  Sharing to YouTube is always a great option, but what if there’s a different online website they regularly visit?  No problem – Windows Live Movie Maker shares the same online publishing platform as Windows Live Photo Gallery, which means developers can write publishing plug-ins to any website or service using our Software Developer Kit (SDK) and whatever SDK is available from that service.  Check out this page for a list of plug-ins that have already been written, and for more information on how to write your own plug-in using our SDK, visit http://dev.live.com/photogallery.  If you’ve written a plug-in, please tell us about it!

Thanks and happy streaming!

- Karthik Anbalagan

Today is a real milestone for people who use Windows Live. Starting today, a select group of SkyDrive customers will be invited to try out a technical preview of the Office Web Apps which are online companions to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, available for free via Windows Live SkyDrive. Over time, as the final version is released, the Office Web Apps will become available to all 500 million+ users of Hotmail, Messenger and other Windows Live services.

While the tech preview doesn’t have all the cool features that will be available in the final offering, it does show off the exciting potential of extending your Office experience to the Web. You can easily access and work with your Office documents from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection.

When those of you participating in the Tech Preview upload or create a new document, you’ll be able to view them much like you do today using the familiar Office toolbars and user interface. The Office Web Apps provide a high-quality experience in terms of both features and fidelity. . And it will be very easy to share your documents in password-protected folders and give permission to whoever you want to have access – just like with any other SkyDrive files.

Personally, I’m excited that, in the final release of the Office Web Apps, I’ll be able to access Office documents from virtually any PC and then be able to share them, show them, edit them, and collaborate on them with people around the globe. I do a lot of presentations so it will be particularly helpful for giving presentations right from Internet Explorer (or Firefox or Safari). Because I’m kind of an Excel geek, I’ll be able to share my spreadsheets in all their glory – with conditional formatting, charts, and more. In the final release, I will also be able to share notes from OneNote in real-time with others.

Over the coming months here are some of things you can expect to be able to do in later versions of the Office Web Apps:

Why are we making Office Web Apps available as part of Windows Live?

We all use a lot of different services online – e-mail, social networks, photo sites, video sites, and so on. In many cases, we use more than one service for very similar purposes, using Facebook, MySpace , StudiVZ, Mixi or many others for social networking; Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Gmail for e-mail; Flickr, SkyDrive, FotoLog, or Photobucket for sharing photos.

That said, there are certain things we really just want one of. I really just want one place for storing contact info, one personal calendar I can share with my family, one primary mail service that also allows me to check all of my e-mail accounts, one place to get updates from all of my social networks, and one place to store, share, and manage my massive and ever-growing collection of photos, documents, music, and videos.

I can get all of that at Windows Live. And now, with the addition of Office Web Apps, I’ll soon be able to go to Windows Live to create, edit, share, and collaborate on Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, OneNote digital notebooks, and Excel spreadsheets –all online regardless of which PC I’m using and whether that PC has Office on it.

I’m super excited about today’s release and the future of Office Web Apps. Over time, we’ll add the OneNote Web App to this experience as well as expand both the functionality and the number of people who get to try out the services.

Today’s a great start on terrific things to come.

If you weren’t one of the folks that received an invitation today, sign up here and we will let you know when you can try it out too.

Stay tuned.

Brian Hall

The Hotmail team has started rolling out updates to improve your Hotmail experience. Most of these are improvements to current features and are meant to make your current Hotmail experience more efficient.

Look for these updates coming to your Hotmail inbox soon: more keyboard shortcuts, a new buddy list for when you sign into your web Messenger from within your Hotmail inbox, improvements to help you pick contacts for your messages, auto-save for your email drafts, and the ability to download all files in a message as a zip file (versus one by one)

In the coming weeks, we will post articles on how to use these updates. Be sure to check them out if you’re interested in learning more about the ever-improving Hotmail experience!

- The Windows Live Hotmail team

Last year, when we updated Windows Live services, we added a broad range of partnerships with leading web companies, to make it simpler for you to share your activities across a number of popular web sites with the people you care about the most.

We know that you have a busy life online, with multiple accounts on separate websites for sharing different things in many different contexts – from blog posts to status updates to photos, and more. That’s why we keep adding more feed and contacts partners to Windows Live – so that you have one place to visit to see what your friends are up to, and one easy way of sharing updates with your network.

Not only does this help simplify your life online, it also opens up the possibility of discovery. By adding these feeds to your profile, you can help your friends discover new things and ideas they hadn’t known, and you will get the same experience by learning about some of the things they decide to share.

In April, we rolled out even more partnerships, including some of the most popular international sites for our customers around the world

Today, we are happy to announce that 23 new feed partners are rolling out in Windows Live this week. New feed partners span a variety of online destinations like blogging sites, music and video sites, photo sites, news sites, reviews sites, portals and social networks, including Blingee, BuddyTV, Goodreads, Hulu, Judy’s Book, MySpace, Newsvine, OleOle, Qik and SlideShare. For a complete list of Windows Live partners, click here.

Adding feeds to your Windows Live Profile is easy. Simply click “Add Web activities” on the left side of your Windows Live Profile page, and select the partner sites you’d like to add. For more detailed instructions on how to add these feeds see our previous blog post.

Also, starting today, you will be able to easily invite friends from AOL Google and Hyves to Windows Live, and vice versa. These contact partners join existing contact partners like Facebook and LinkedIn. By providing you the option to bring in your contacts from different networks, Windows Live makes it simple for you to manage your contact lists from one place by consolidating them on Windows Live. For a quick tutorial on how to share contacts between Windows Live and third party sites, refer to this previous blog post by Rob Dolin.

To get started, visit your Windows Live homepage at http://www.home.live.com

Happy connecting!!

- Windows Live team

The rapid pace of innovation and competition among camera manufacturers has put increasingly impressive technologies into the hands of ever more people. The number of megapixels in consumer-level cameras has gone up, and new features in cameras and software like Windows Live Photo Gallery make it even easier to do creative things like making panoramas with your photos.

In the past, if you tried to upload your beautiful new panoramas to Windows Live Photos in their original size, you couldn’t view them right on the site. Today we’re rolling out a new release of Photos that bumps our limit on photo size up—way up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels – more than enough to accommodate even this panorama:

 
Click for full-size image 

We’ve also taken a magnifying glass to the image quality of photos—in all their various sizes—throughout the site. We wanted to add more “wow” to your pictures, and we think our changes make everything from thumbnails to images viewed in the slideshow look noticeably better.

We’re super excited about those improvements, but we know that if moving through a photo album takes forever, it may not matter how beautiful your photos are. We’ve also put a lot of work into making photo albums faster to browse through—you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. You can try it out in this album:

To try out these new, cool features go to Windows Live Photos.

We hope all of these improvements make it even easier and more fun for you to tell your stories and share the exciting moments of your life with your family and friends!

- The Windows Live Photos team

On September 8^th, President Obama announced his Back to School challenge – the “I Am What I Learn” video contest for students. The President is asking students to create videos describing what they can do to improve their education, and the role education will play in fulfilling their dreams.

Let Windows Live help you tell that story. Windows Live Movie Maker is a powerful free video editing application from Microsoft, which is a part of Windows Live Essentials, that can help you quickly create and easily share your videos. Get up and running in minutes using content from the most popular types of cameras, camcorders, and webcams; and be able to share your video across a wide range of media.

The video posted below showcases some of the visual effects you could add to your movie easily by using Movie Maker

We put together a little step-by-step guide to help you create that awesome video!

With a webcam:

1. Most webcams come with software that allows you to capture/record video from your webcam to your computer. Using this software, record your story.

2. Once you capture your story on video using your webcam. Save the file to a folder on your hard drive.

With a camcorder or camera that records video:

1. Set up the camcorder/camera – record your story

2. Plug your camcorder/camera to your computer, import your files to a folder on your hard drive using a free application such as Windows Live Photo Gallery (a part of the same suite of software that Movie Maker is a member of).

Then make your movie!

3. With Movie Maker open, click on the Add Videos and Photos button or click on the Storyboard pane in the application to open up the explorer window. Find your recently captured video and click Open.

4. With the content in your project, you can now easily edit your video:

a. To trim a clip – select the video clip you want to edit, click Video Tools -> Trim Tools -> and use the Trim Bars on either side of the preview bar to find the exact spot in the clip you want to trim to.

b. Add a Transition between clips – select the clip you want to transition to, click Animations in the Ribbon toolbar, preview the animations before you apply them simply by hovering your mouse over the different effects, when you’re ready to apply the effect -> simply click on the animation and it’s added to your content. You can do this for as many or as few pieces of content as you wish.

c. Add a Visual Effect – similar to adding a Transition, select the clip you want to add a visual effect to, click on the Visual Effects tab in the Ribbon toolbar, hover your mouse over the different effects to preview what it would look like when added to your content, then simply click on the transition to add it.

d. Add a soundtrack – With your content organized in your project, you can add a soundtrack simply by clicking on the Music Note in the Ribbon Toolbar under the Home Tab. Once you click on the Music Note, an explorer window will open allowing you to select the music you would like to add. Once you found the song, click open and it is automatically added to your project. From here, you can fine tune the placement of the song (for example, have it start after the dramatic opening of your of your speech, or announce your movie with a rocking soundtrack that fades out as you begin your story). To fine tune the song, start by dragging the song across your content in the Storyboard to where you would like it to start. Just like editing video, you can also split and trim your soundtrack to fit your movie perfectly.

e. Use photos as transitions – a very cool effect to move from video clip to video clip is the use of photos as a transition. When you have two video clips next to each other without a transition, the result can look mediocre – but add a transition between the two and instantly your video looks more professional. Then take it to the next level by getting creative with the transitions used, for example; in a video clip of a speech talking about what you would like to see happen in the near future, use a photo as a symbol and transition to help better tell the story. To add this, simply find the spot in your video where you want to add this photo -> click Video Tools -> Split (which will split your video into two parts at that point) -> then insert the photo at the split either by dragging the photo to that point, or clicking Add Videos and Photos from the Ribbon toolbar and adding it separately. Once inserted, you can change the duration of time that the photo is shown by clicking on the edit tab and selecting an amount of time from the Duration drop down menu. Now add the final touches, adding a transition animation to the photo and the two video clips will really give some polish to your movie. Click on the Animations Tab, select your content – preview the transition animations until you find the one you want to add -> select the animation by clicking on it -> and be sure to do this for each piece of content (you can shortcut this by selecting all [Ctrl+A] or clicking and dragging your mouse over all the content and selecting an animation, this will apply it to all selected content – which is called Batch Editing).

You can follow the guide above, or, better still, you can use the resources posted below. These are links to videos that demo how to use Movie Maker. You will be a pro in no time!

- Introduction to Windows Live Movie Maker

- Create movies easily

- Easily share your movies

We hope you will have fun working on the Obama challenge. Don’t forget to earn some good karma by telling your friends about Movie Maker!

- The Windows Live Team

As you may know, you can add a “Web Activity” for Facebook (click here) and bring your status, photos, shared links, and more from Facebook into Windows Live to share in Messenger, Hotmail, and on your Windows Live Profile.  What you may not know is that if you add the Facebook web activity, the data is passed from Facebook to Windows Live using a developing open standard called “Activity Streams.”  With hundreds of thousands of users since release a few months ago, the Windows Live web activity for Facebook might be the largest implementation of Activity Streams today.  My personal thanks to Jerry Cain, Mike Vernal, and the others engineers at Facebook who designed and built Facebook’s Activity Streams implementation. 

Just as many of our other web activities leverage community standards like RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, and MediaRSS, I’m hopeful that Activity Streams will be a powerful enabling technology so users can bring their activities like status updates, posted photos, or shared links, from one service to another; and looking forward to working with other partners to enable our mutual users to share their activities between services. 

If you haven’t already done so, check it out today by clicking here

Thanks—

--Rob Dolin

Program Manager, Windows Live team

Today, we are changing the way Windows Live Hotmail messages come into Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage. While you may have to tweak some settings, you will notice additional speed and efficiency. Please check out the Hotmail team blog for their previous post to learn what you need to do in order to keep receiving Hotmail in Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage.

Keep in mind, this does not affect access through the web and customers can continue to view Hotmail messages on the web at http://mail.live.com or http://www.hotmail.com.

Questions or trouble updating your mail program? View the FAQ page or visit the help community.

For more details, please visit the Hotmail team blog

Sincerely,
Your Windows Live Hotmail Team