Slashdot Mirror

Er, no?

While Moonlight is a Novell product based on Mono, GPL'ed and all that, it also gets support from Microsoft in providing unit tests and that kind of thing.

And there's this agreement explicitly waiving the right to sue users of Moonlight getting it from Novell:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx

I think of Silverlight as having three pillars: .NET runtime, XAML, and media.

C# and the .NET CLI are both ECMA specs:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm

The specification for XAML has been published under the Open Specification Promise:
http://www.betanews.com/article/XAML-specification-published-added-to-Microsofts-open-promise/1206482161

And for media formats, Silverlight 3 supports:
WMV (VC-1 is a SMPTE standard, other components under RAND licensing)
MPEG-4 with H.264 and AAC-LC (ISO spec)
MP3 (ISO spec)
Generic extensibility via Raw AV MediaStreamSource

There's even a royalty-paid codec pack for Moonlight provided by Microsoft.

If you've got practical suggestions for how we could be more open than this, I'd love to hear them, but I think there has already been a lot of traction in that direction. It certainly goes well beyond what Adobe does for Gnash, and Moonlight is already capable of handling many more high-profile Silverlight sites than any non-Adobe Flash player is. Even:

http://www.smoothhd.com/

Silverlight 2 supports MP3 and WMV files. WMV uses the SMPTE standard VC-1 codec.

Silverlight 3 (in public beta) adds support for MPEG-4 files and the H.264 and AAC-LC codecs. Most MPEG-4 files that play well in both QuickTime and Flash will also play inside Silverlight 3.

And bear in mind that the FLV spec you pointed to is just the file format. There are no public specs for either the VP6 video codec, or the Flash streaming protocols.

There's no such thing as the "Silverlight video format." There is the new Smooth Streaming technology, but the file format there is an ISO MPEG-4 implementation.

As for WHY Silverlight for media, check out:

http://www.smoothhd.com/
http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

they're signing up with Microsoft to force Silverlight onto the world, reminding me of Medica's website -- which is completely inaccessible in anything but Internet Exploiter thanks to them deploying Sharepoint for everything.

Of course, Silverlight can do some very impressive streaming. http://www.smoothhd.com/
This is just Netflix who goofed up.

And Sharepoint works fine in non-IE browsers, including the javascript and stuff. There's a few integration features with office that require ActiveX, but if its used as a website, those wouldn't matter.

On the media side, check out:

http://www.smoothhd.com/

I can't. It requires some plugin that I have no intention of installing. Ever.

I've decided to not install any more software from companies repeatedly proven to be guilty of crimes and even after the fact showing no intentions whatsoever to stop doing it again, and again. If things change, and can be proven to have actually changed, then, and only then, I might reconsider.

Maybe my sense of morals is different, but there it is.

And I don't see anything in Silverlight that isn't similarly addressed by HTML5. Ergo, HTML5 is superior for its standardization, true cross-platform support, and competing implementations that can meet the needs of many different ideals.

As I said elsewhere, HTML5 has no way to do anything like this:

http://www.smoothhd.com/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Expression-Encoder-2-Service-Pack-1-ndash-Intro-and-Multibitrate-Encoding/

As for cross-platform, Moonlight 2.0 should be able to run SmoothHD just fine, and more importantly a whole lot of content published using that platform.

On the media side, check out:

http://www.smoothhd.com/

I encoded the "Big Buck Bunny" clip up there :). It's still in pre-alpha, but you should be able to get the idea

This uses a new API called MediaStreamSource, which enables file parsers and protocols to be built in managed code, and then hand off the video and audio bitstreams to Silverlight's built int decoders.

In the case of Smooth Streaming, every two seconds of the video is a seperate http request, and each of those chunks is available in six different data rates. Managed code heuristics running inside of Silverlight dynamically pick the right bitrate for the next chunk based on available CPU power, network speed, and window size (no reason to download 720p if the brower window is shrunk down in a corner of the stream).

And because this is based around small http requests, chunks get proxy cached, so 100 people watching the same video behind the same firewall would only need to get a single copy, providing much better scalability than traditional unicast streaming.

Anyway, this is something that Flash certainly can't do, and I haven't seen any hint of HTML5 being able to do. Pulling it all together requires some pretty specific characteristics of the video decoder (the ability to switch resolutions with a new sequence header without any pause), an API like MediaStreamSource, and having a performant enough runtime to be able to run all the heuristics and parsing without using much CPU.

I blogged the authoring workflow for this and some other details here:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Expression-Encoder-2-Service-Pack-1-ndash-Intro-and-Multibitrate-Encoding/

This is a sample of what I've been working on these days:

http://smoothhd.com/

Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.

Get rid of silverlight and I will view it... I refuse to install that crap.. just MS latest attempt to control the web.

I don't think Microsoft wanted either format to gain critical mass - wide and early adoption is a threat to Microsoft's goal of 'services', including pay per view and digital downloads. Microsoft set HD video back by a year, that's all they got and that's all they wanted.

I worked on the HD DVD team back then, and we manifestly wanted HD DVD to win, and we invested quite a lot in it. However, we didn't bet the Xbox 360 on it the way Sony bet the PS3 on BD (which appears to have been a good choice from the console business perspective). In the end, Sony was willing pay to whatever cost it took for BD to win.

Our interest was much more in delivering great video experiences than in which particular substrate thickness of polycarbonate imaged with a blue-violet laser won in the end.

This is a sample of what I've been working on these days:

http://smoothhd.com/

Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.