While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.

I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.

However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I'm a database developer, not a designer.

Silverlight only displays WMV formats.

So my next idea was to point to Microsoft's YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.

Then I looked at Yahoo... more flash videos.

Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.