Forum Discussion
Microsoft Stream is no Replacement for Office Mix
MicrosoftChristopher Sherman - You are correct that Microsoft Stream is not a full replacement for Office Mix. We plan over the course of time to bring some of the awesome features of Mix to Stream, but right now Stream lets you play your Mixes as videos.
Can you give more specifics on upload times that took really long on Stream? Are you talking time to upload the file to Stream only, or time it took to be able to play the video after transcoding was done? If you give us more specifics there we might be able to see what's going on.
I am having a similar issue. I teach online courses using recorded Powerpoint lectures. With Mix, I would record the lecture and the "Upload to Mix." The upload process took 5 minutes or less. Now, I use the Record feature, then have to "Export to Video" which can take over an hour, then upload that video to Stream, which also takes substantially longer than the Mix upload time. I was such a proponent of Mix and I recommended it to everyone I knew who taught online as a perfect platform for professor's needs, so I am very disappointed that the replacement for Mix is so cumbersome and time intensive.
- Marc Mroz
Elena Windsong - We hear your concerns and frustrations and are looking into how we can bring some of the best of Office Mix into Stream/PowerPoint. We need to get a little further along in our planning, designing, and thinking before we can share more specifics. But we are listening and taking action internally here on the Stream and PowerPoint teams.
Let me give a little bit of clarification here to explain what you are seeing. I know this doesn't solve anything for you but I want to make sure you understand what is currently happening and a little of the why.
The Recording tab with "Publish to Stream" and Office Mix are very different solutions, they are similar but not the same. When you click the "Publish to Stream" button, PowerPoint is physically rendering out a video of your PowerPoint, stitching together the animations, video, inking, slide transitions, etc. This is why you are seeing longer delays in upload. Publish is really render a video, then upload to Stream. The rendering a video in PowerPoint on your computer is what is taking so long.
The Office Mix service was different in it's approach. Office Mix had an entire service behind it that handled these special PPTX files created in PowerPoint. When you published to Office Mix you were just uploading the PPTX and raw video files inside of if you did screen recording or web cam capture. The Office Mix service then did all work from there. When you played an office mix it was automatically switching in the Mix player between videos, slides, etc. It only needed to render out a flat video file in some cases for mobile. As such the publish time from PowerPoint to playback was much less than what I described above for publishing to Stream. The issue is that Office Mix service was a beta/preview service. As such it didn't have all the compliance, standards, and governance of a full fledged O365 service. Unfortunately not all preview/beta services turn into full services. But we are looking now very seriously about how we can bridge that gap with PowerPoint and Stream.
I know this is frustrating and we are sorry for the pain this has caused.
Thanks Marc,
I appreciate how difficult this is, but simply put -- EXTEND THE DEADLINE FOR MIX. Until an equal or better solution can be developed.
Regards Kim
Agree. this is really a problem as I also produced quite a few training modules that are interactive. I put a ton of work into these and now the whole this is just useless. They don't work without being online in mix. Stream is just a video. If I wanted to do videos I would have done videos.
What replacement is there?
Couldn't agree more to the comments in these posts.
I am a high school Physics teachers and had tentatively begun to move all my efforts in on-line teaching resources to Mix and, like other contributors, had promoted the product strongly in my school, running a number of INSET sessions on it.
Mix was brilliant - easier to use than all the methods I had toyed with previously. And the ability to embed other HTML5 content, such as interactive PhET simulations, was so exciting.
I'm hoping Stream will get there in the end but at the moment I think we've taken a big step backward.
- Marc Mroz
Robert Rushakoff - As far as I know there isn't a full replacement for Office Mix which was a "preview" service, sorry. We will be working to bring more mix like features to Stream over time in the future.
