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."

Comments

Re:freely implementable standard? please

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:freely implementable standard? please

[AKAImBatman]

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.)

Smooth Streaming!

[benwaggoner]

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/