Forum Discussion
Microsoft Stream is no Replacement for Office Mix
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.
MicrosoftElena 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
Thank you for your reply. I understood that most of the time was spent having PowerPoint render the video and then upload the rendered project to Stream. I am very curious about plans to help Stream become a must-have e-learning tool. Multiple Choice, True/False, Drag and Drop, Matching question types that could be authored from PowerPoint and allow teachers to collect data from users in Stream would be amazing. Combining this with an AI agent that attempted to evaluate short answers would also be valuable.
Does the roadmap for Steam include this functionality and, if so, when can we expect previews.Why switch off core features that people chose Mix for (analytics, quizzes etc)? The whole decommissioning of Mix has come far too quickly. I would urge you to extend the Mix platform at least another 6 months until you have more concrete timelines on what features will be added to Stream and when. At the very least, provide a clear alternative option to retain functionality of Mix to get people by.
For instance the process said it would be May, 2018. But you actually can't upload to office mix cloud as of today!
Found that out the hard way this morning. As a result, I can't provide closed captions! Not great at all.
I dont think you are understanding the main issue. Besides the interactivity the ppt file produced by using the recording tab is 4x the size of a ppt file when using office mix to record the video. This needs to be fixed asap, else pretty much it will be useless? as a 2 hour lecture which was 500mb in office mix, now it is 2gb.
can someone please address asap
