Expression Media is largely unchanged from the iView MediaPro 3 application that Microsoft acquired as its media asset management platform, but it does include one important new feature: a bundled version of Expression Media Encoder.

Expression Media Encoder is designed to prepare video for your design projects and to ensure the resulting files provide the best possible mix of onscreen quality and file-size efficiency. As such, Expression Media Encoder fulfils the same role as Adobe’s Flash Video Encoder, outputting to WMV format rather than FLV. However, Media Encoder is more polished than its rival, sharing the usability and efficiency of the core Expression components.

Basic operation is simple: just import your video files into the queue, set in and out points in the preview, choose output profiles to set size and desired bitrate, and then hit Encode. And there’s plenty more power available, including the ability to add markers, script-based triggers, leaders, trailers, metadata, thumbnails and bitmap overlays, as well as compare the quality of different profiles and settings side-by-side.

Most impressive is the option to choose an output template, which automatically wraps the resulting WMV file in one of a range of player skins and provides all the necessary HTML, XAML and JavaScript files to enable cross-platform playback in the browser.

However, there’s a catch: this browser-based display of WMV files depends on Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is based on a subset of XAML and .NET with added JavaScript features. The problem is that the other Expression Studio apps aren’t yet geared up for Silverlight, and neither are your likely end users.

Media Encoder’s Silverlight support will undoubtedly play an important role in future releases of Expression Studio, but for the moment it’s as ahead of its time as Expression Media is behind.