Slashdot Mirror
Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files."
Something like this perhaps?
SVG + Video > Silverlight
And that's only the tip of the technological iceberg. Behold the power of HTML5. Coming to every web browser except Internet Explorer.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Would this work with Netflix?
That seems to be the message Microsoft is sending.
Oh yes, will it run on my ARM processor (where Flash runs just fine)?
Which post would that be? The one where Microsoft failed to implement DOM2 events, then implemented HTML5 features based on DOM2 events and therefore incompatible with the standards, therefore not HTML5?
Don't get me started. IE8 is a sore point for me. You WON'T appreciate what you hear. (Or maybe you will. But it won't be the most pleasant conversation.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The WebKit CSS extensions added in Mobile Safari are interesting. I wish for people to agree on a version of this for all browsers, as it would replace Flash in at least some areas.
http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
Well, even with this, I STILL can't watch anything on Netflix's "Watch It Now" section... because THAT requires Moonlight AND ActiveX (and I still had to forge my UA just to get that far).
We're no farther along than we were before.. as always.
It's designed to directly compete with Flash. The "problem" that it solves is that Adobe is dominating a market that Microsoft wants. You may notice that most of Microsoft's products attempt to solve similar problems.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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/
My video compression blog
We all can bash silverlight, but but theres nothing wrong with it. Its a newer, and from what i've seen, more stable alternative to flash.
I don't see anything in that demo that wasn't in Silverlight 1.0 demos a couple of years ago.
My video compression blog
define dependant? i don't know too many serious sites (that matter) that actually RELY on Flash for anything. 98% of all flash content is either banner ads or YouTube/RedTube/etc
What is...?
Even with Silverlight they majority of the demos don't work or work so entirely poorly that they make Flash look good.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yes, I can just see the lines of linux users just queuing up in anxious trepidation waiting to be able to use Windows Media Video and Audio files on their beloved linux systems...
The day this article hit slashdot I said that the purpose for this was to insert Microsoft IP into Linux. People called me crazy. Well, we're here! Let's all get comfy in this brave new world, shall we?
Does anybody still trust Novell? Why?
Oh, and Windows Media Player is way cool, because it has the codecs for Plays For Now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd like to watch movies from netflix
Ok, so you need this for Netflix.
Any other reasons why you'd want Silverlight?
Honestly, not trolling. Netflix is apparently one reason, and a good one. What are the others?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Um, portions of Silverlight are public source and moonlight *is* OSS.
It may not be Richart Stallman perfect, but it works for even a jaded manager like me.
This from the person who said Vista was faster than that bloated XP.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1024039&cid=25706211
I was curious to see what type of "jaded" manager would consider public source the same as open source so I checked your history.
You're good at hiding your "true" feelings because most your posts seem very pro-vista and critical of OSS (usually, though, with the disclaimer that you use such and such linux app. Reminds me of the Seinfield epdisode where the guy could make fun of everyone because he used to be whatever his target was too.)
games, the flash games market is still huge, attracting major sponsors and advertising revenue.
silverlight is a hell of a lot easier to develop for, I for one hope the linux support catches up as do the non visual studio dev tools/IDEs.
Moonlight features codecs that have already been licensed by Microsoft from major media companies. Moonlight users are indemnified against litigation that might arise from their use in Moonlight due to the Novell whole agreement...thing. In other words, everyone's safe from the (possible or otherwise) threat of litigation, honest!
Also, Moonlight 1.0 has been tested with, and passed, all the regression-testing tools Microsoft tested with Silverlight. Meaning a guaranteed high level of compatibility.
Of course the motivation behind this isn't of course Microsoft's "throbbing heart" for the FOSS community; it's purely and simply that it wants to blow Flash out of the water, and is even willing to Open Source, support, and invest heavily in OSS to do it if necessary.
And that's good because it means Adobe will have to raise the bar on flash now someone's invading it's territory...put another way, did you REALLY think you'd get 64-bit flash support on Linux from Adobe if Silverlight hadn't been released?
throw new NoSignatureException();
It's not a stopgap, it's an alternative. Microsoft is trying to kill HTML5 with Silverlight. They will fail I think, because IE market share is dropping and nearly everyone technical wants them to die now. If IE6 didn't do it, Vista did.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I agree you shouldn't use plugins where it's not needed (and that improved CSS and Canvas support, and some generic video controls makes the need for most plugins moot). I agree that Flash is entirely over used.
However, from a development standpoint, with .NET/Mono you can create content on a wide range of platforms (not just Windows, but Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc) in wide a range of languages which all can be used to build Common Intermediate Language bytecode (linking to other libraries which might be written in other languages).
A lot of people simply assume it's all entirely proprietary as people don't realize the runtime formats are ISO and ECMA standards, as is C# - though sadly Silverlight specifically is not, though it does have an open source client in Moonlight.
The major benefits of Mono/.NET are you can write one class, in the language you want to (C#, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc) and that you can use that very same class in your backend web services, your front end desktop client, your mobile version and - with Silverlight/Mono - on your website. That is really useful (and it would be much more so if all platforms supported the CLR).
It's an approach to development which, from a development standpoint, really makes sense. We all know what sort of crap Microsoft historically pull when it comes to embrace and extend, but that isn't justification to be blind to an open platform that has real benefits - it's easy to reject the proprietary junk and build to the ISO/ECMA standard (and open source implementation).
Of course, we could have had the same functionality years ago with Java, had Sun not spent years holding such a tight leash on it. C'est la vie.