Agreed. I have found hulu's ad content to be quite tolerable. I am surprised all the TV networks aren't jumping on the bandwagon. The advertisers get better exposure than the typical commercial hopping performed by tivo users.
Disney (and thus ABC) just joined Hulu.
Although note advertisers are still paying more per eyeball-minute for prime time broadcast TV. And the big cable operators pay many orders of magnitude more for content than all the streaming/download providers put together.
Streaming may be the furture, but it's certainly not a significant portion of how content protection gets paid for yet.
Ad revenue is nice, but too many people making too much content, and a widely fractured audience, make it less and less profitable.
...for the most popular programs. However, there's also been a huge explosion in the number of shows produced and channels to deliver the on. That MASH episode mainly had to compete agasint two other broadcast networks plus whatever local stations were on in that region. Cable hadn't gone nearly as big then, and didn't have nearly as many channels, and digital sat didn't even exist (it was still those massive jacuzzi-sized dishes).
From an aggregator/publisher perspective, they're worried about how big an audience they can get (cume) and how much advertising they can sell per viewer (cpm).
Also, production costs have gone down for lots of programming. By one example, going from film to digital means big savings in film stock, lab fees, lighting (a CCD needs less light for a clean image), and postproduction. Modern desktop editing software is incredibly cheaper and incredibly more efficient than and old film cutting station.
In a lot of ways, you can think of the industry moving from low-cost programming being a few shows in local vertical markets to going broad. The stuff on Planet Green or HGTV or the Food Network would have been local shows with a small audience relative to the USA a couple of decades ago. Now they're national shows with a similarly small audience, but clustered by interest instead of geography.
In the original article, they made the very important point that cpm for online advertising is below that for TV advertising. That might not make sense, but that is the market reality at this point.
Well, to be honest the real Acrobat is quite useful for modifying, combining, or generating PDF files. For example, it's got a pretty darn good built in scanner driver + OCR that I've used to good effect for massively multipage documents. I'm always glad to have the real Acrobat around when I'm doing a job it's designed for.
But just for dumping out an output file? Yeah, that's pretty crazy, and something Mac OS X has had built in for ages and ages.
The built-in Office PDF exporter is also quite a bit faster than doing the same with Acrobat, and it seems to make smaller lossless files by default (although Acrobat can often Shrink them below that if you're willing to limit to very recent versions of PDF).
Well, Outlook 2007 could be slow with huge mailboxes. But I think the rest of the apps were always quite speedy. I had recently switched from Keynote on the Mac to PowerPoint 2003 on Windows, and found 2003 really slow and cumbersome. Once I had the beta of PowerPoint 2007, it felt like I was able to work at speed again.
And Excel has always been freakishly fast for normal tasks, even back in the 80's. It's only with big datasets, particularly when charting, that I even notice it thinking anymore.
I prefer the ???x ones; easier to search and typically smaller due to being automatically zipped.
As for obsolete? They're not a bad design considering the low-end of hardware people would have had around 1996-1997 and needed to support forward compatibility from even older formats then. And it's arguably a feature for interoperability that they didn't get any breaking changes for a decade.
You could do a lot in Word 97. I remember trying to use WordPerfect to write a screenplay around that time, and their code scheme simply couldn't scale to a couple hundred pages with dozens of style changes per page. When I converted to.doc and Word, the file was about 20% the size and performance had to be 10x faster.
Yes, it was on a 80 MHz computer, but heck, some people were stuck with 80 MHz computers back then.
This probably reflects that a lot of IE installs are on managed desktops where IT picks when the browser is updated. Firefox doesn't play in that market.
I imagine that consumers with IE installed upgrade at a rate a lot closer to the Firefox rate.
It's probably more an issue of the IE number capturing from two big demographics, while Firefox only frone ones of those.
Were Firefox to ever get big in the enterprise, it'd only get updated on the standard corporate image refresh cycles too.
Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?
Because it does it better?
In my world (media), it's really hard to use XP after Vista, because it kills me to be using my CPU to be rendering graphics the GPU can do better. Much smoother GUI performance, particularly under load. Aero Glass is probably the most misunderestimated feature of Vista and Win 7, since many assume it'll hurt performance. But with a DX9 capable GPU, it's a very nice boost in both experience and CPU load.
Also, the whole media pipeline is a lot faster, particularly on lower-end machines and with higher-end media. An even bigger jump than XP > Vista was.
You can create content with a lot of software products out there and use maybe the best encoder possible for free, as it's open source.
...and there aren't a huge number of WMV encoders out there? Plenty for free.
Silverlight 3 will support MPEG-4 files with H.264 as well, so that's not going to be an ongoing issue anyway.
With Silverlight you can only work with WMV or Microsoft technologies and you have to pay royalties and buy the video codec.
In what scenario would you pay codec royalites with Silverlight and not with Flash? H.264 and VC-1 are both MPEG-LA licensed codecs with similar terms.
here's a tip for you. Open your silverlight player, run a movie. This one is decoded with hardware acceleration, with overlay mode and all the tricks possible to keep the cpu usage low.
Silverlight 2 doesn't use GPU acceleration. That's being added for Silverlight 3.
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.
Sure, there's always an analog hole, but it raises the ante significantly for someone to do it.
And bear in mind that places that are that highly focused on security, cameras are not allowed. People get frisked coming in/out, and even camera phones aren't allowed. So we're talking about a component of defense-in-depth.
As for TSVN, that could certainly work fine for text-only documents, but I don't think it'd work well for design elements of a document, which can also be previewed. There's a lot of power in being able to get a print preview of differenet stages of the document, seeing what edits who made, toggling between markup view and final view, etcetera.
There's an audience for whom TSVN would work, but that's not that audience we're taking about. And there's a lot of value in enabling people from multiple companies to be able to collaborate in the same way.
It's a common programmer assumption that Word==".doc render/editor" and to not understand why Word isn't interchanageable with other seemingly functional.doc render/editors.
But as you suggest, it's the processes more than anything else that are critical to why business perfer to pay for Office than use OpenOffice for free. The more likely a feature is something an OpenOffice advocate claims "no one would use" the more likely it's something of interest to the people not buying OpenOffice. And a big part of that is the collaboration and security features. Being able to flag and encrypt a document so that a screen shot can't be taken of it? Probably sounds like crazy talk to a programmer, but really important for anyone who ants to keep content confidential.
And the whole revision markup collaboration workfow with SharePoint is huge and very broadly used. It's basically a SCM for business documents.
Another way of looking at the story of Word would be:
The Word team was the best at delivering the kind of word processor people want to pay money for.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are very good at the things that people who purchase software for big enterprises are willing to pay for. There's tons of features that may seem incredibly beside-the-point for the needs of a programmer. But programmers don't sign off on a lot of big purchase orders for word processing or office productivity software.
As to your other point, I would say the tech companies that survive and thrive are the ones who pull off a successful synthesis of technology and business focus. And that definitely requires a rare leader who combines talent in both areas, or more commonly good collaboration between the technical and business focused staff.
It's no healthier for the hackers to look down on the suits than for the suits to look down on the hackers. The most fun technical projects I've worked on are those where the technical folks have a real sense of how their efforts fund their own paychecks. Information flow and mutual respect are the keys here.
Exactly. The problem isn't that IE6 was a bad browser for its era. The problem is that lots of people haven't upgraded to a more recent version, which is typical of the corporate managed desktop market.
IE7's been on the market for, what 2.5 years now? How many people are still running 2.5 year old versions of Firefox or Safari on thier personal desktops? Not many. And that's not something about IE in particular, but of some markets where IE is dominant. I don't imagine many avid gamers on Windows are running IE6, as a counterexample.
Had Windows bundled Netscape instead of IE, it'd be Netscape we'd be griping about today. But the real issue is how slow corporate desktops are to get updated for ANYTHING not required for security or line-of-business.
Windows Media Player 9, which was released back in 2003, has only become standard in corporate America in the last year or so, and there are some holdouts even there.
The OP mentions that this is not available for the Mac version of the Expression suite.
This is because that doesn't exist. The Expression Media product is cross-platform, as it is a new version of iView, a cross-platform product Microsoft purchased.
Perhaps this is more an issue about Windows' dominance on managed corporate desktops.
IE6 is the version that gets most of the ire about compatibility. But the current version is IE8, which is quite standards compliant, and IE7 was much better in that regard than IE6.
IE6 came out October 2001, the same month as Netscape 6.2, and the better part of a year before Mozilla 1.0 was released. Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet? Does anyone still regularly test sites against either?
How much of this is because non-IE browsers aren't commonly used in the enterprise, and thus older versions of them don't wind up deployed nearly as long?
The correct way to do something like this is to archive the full lossless version on the media server with a big drive, and then only sync the lossy portion to the device. That would require some new player functionality, but is presumably what Thomson intended, although that's not how it's described in the article. That's how past proposals along this line were supposed to work.
That said, its not clear that there's a meaningful advantage in doing lossy + diff versus just doing a lossy + lossless as seperate tracks. Transcoding at sync is lightning fast anyway; I'm not sure what advantage there is doing it in advance.
The idea of a lossy + lossles layer isn't new: DTS has done it for several years now. And the idea of a lossy + enhancement layer has been around even longer, in MP3Pro, HE AAC, and WMA 10 Pro.
For HD DVD and Blu-ray authoring, the CineVision PSE system we designed for VC-1 used a hybrid spatial/temporal model.
First, the codec itself was 4-way threaded, encoding each 1920x1080 frame as four slices. Then the file was distributed across multiple blades, each processing a section of the video. Since this was for disc-authoring, we knew where chapters were going to be in advance, and so split by chapter; ideally you'd have at least 2x as many chapters as workers.
The key to avoiding the "chunk transitions" was aligning along chapters, since they almost always start at a scene change or a black frame, so it'd be easy to see the problem. Also, there is extensive 3rd pass support to manually tweak a transition that could go wrong. There was a fair amount of workflow that had to get baked in to get full advantage of the paralleization, like prepopulating each worker with the source during the 1st pass and keeping it cached for the 2nd and potentially 3rd passes.
Anyway, it works nicely; that product was used for 90% or so of HD DVD titles and about a third of Blu-ray titles so far. Last I heard, the record for a 2 hour movie encode was about 6 hours for 2 passes. I'm sure it'd be faster yet with more recent processors. That scaled up to 64-128 cores pretty well, given source chapters. With overlapping scene detection in the first pass, it could be scalable well beyond that for long-form content. Of course, with short content you're not so worried about end-to-end encoding time, but full throughput.
As suggested earlier, live streaming is that hard stuff, since you can't do significant temporal slicing without adding a whole lot of latency.
We have a similar kind of issue with Smooth Streaming for Silverlight, where we encode the same source in multiple bitrates, and need to make sure GOPs are aligned across all the data rates for seamless switching. For an example of that:
You need to buy from your competitors in order to compete against them?
Bear in mind that A) Silverlight is free, and B) there's an in-progress GPL'ed version of it.
In the classic GNU/Linux tradition, wouldn't the appropriate respose for any users wanting features not supported in Moonlight to add those features to Moonlight?
Has anyone actually tried the site in the Moonlight 2.0 builds yet?
The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.
I don't think anythig uses QuickTime streaming (RTSP) for content delivery. There's plenty of http progressive download with QuickTime, but that's something else.
If you like Server 2008 as a workstation, you're liking Vista as a workstation. It's the same kernel with different services on by default. You can just turn off the services you don't want on Vista quite easily, and get an essentially identical experience.
And with decent server-class equipment, even the default install of Vista should outperform that of XP for typical use. There's a lot to be said for pushing the CPU hit of rendering the GUI to the GPU.
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Agreed. I have found hulu's ad content to be quite tolerable. I am surprised all the TV networks aren't jumping on the bandwagon. The advertisers get better exposure than the typical commercial hopping performed by tivo users.
Disney (and thus ABC) just joined Hulu.
Although note advertisers are still paying more per eyeball-minute for prime time broadcast TV. And the big cable operators pay many orders of magnitude more for content than all the streaming/download providers put together.
Streaming may be the furture, but it's certainly not a significant portion of how content protection gets paid for yet.
Ad revenue is nice, but too many people making too much content, and a widely fractured audience, make it less and less profitable.
...for the most popular programs. However, there's also been a huge explosion in the number of shows produced and channels to deliver the on. That MASH episode mainly had to compete agasint two other broadcast networks plus whatever local stations were on in that region. Cable hadn't gone nearly as big then, and didn't have nearly as many channels, and digital sat didn't even exist (it was still those massive jacuzzi-sized dishes).
From an aggregator/publisher perspective, they're worried about how big an audience they can get (cume) and how much advertising they can sell per viewer (cpm).
Also, production costs have gone down for lots of programming. By one example, going from film to digital means big savings in film stock, lab fees, lighting (a CCD needs less light for a clean image), and postproduction. Modern desktop editing software is incredibly cheaper and incredibly more efficient than and old film cutting station.
In a lot of ways, you can think of the industry moving from low-cost programming being a few shows in local vertical markets to going broad. The stuff on Planet Green or HGTV or the Food Network would have been local shows with a small audience relative to the USA a couple of decades ago. Now they're national shows with a similarly small audience, but clustered by interest instead of geography.
In the original article, they made the very important point that cpm for online advertising is below that for TV advertising. That might not make sense, but that is the market reality at this point.
Give me one good reason why it was a good idea to use these bastardized toolbars instead of the usual menus and normal toolbars.
Context sensitive discovery of relevant features?
I spend a lot less time deep in nested menus or modal dialog boxes with the Ribbon.
Well, to be honest the real Acrobat is quite useful for modifying, combining, or generating PDF files. For example, it's got a pretty darn good built in scanner driver + OCR that I've used to good effect for massively multipage documents. I'm always glad to have the real Acrobat around when I'm doing a job it's designed for.
But just for dumping out an output file? Yeah, that's pretty crazy, and something Mac OS X has had built in for ages and ages.
The built-in Office PDF exporter is also quite a bit faster than doing the same with Acrobat, and it seems to make smaller lossless files by default (although Acrobat can often Shrink them below that if you're willing to limit to very recent versions of PDF).
Well, Outlook 2007 could be slow with huge mailboxes. But I think the rest of the apps were always quite speedy. I had recently switched from Keynote on the Mac to PowerPoint 2003 on Windows, and found 2003 really slow and cumbersome. Once I had the beta of PowerPoint 2007, it felt like I was able to work at speed again.
And Excel has always been freakishly fast for normal tasks, even back in the 80's. It's only with big datasets, particularly when charting, that I even notice it thinking anymore.
Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented.
The legacy binary formats have been documented for a while as well.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx
I prefer the ???x ones; easier to search and typically smaller due to being automatically zipped.
As for obsolete? They're not a bad design considering the low-end of hardware people would have had around 1996-1997 and needed to support forward compatibility from even older formats then. And it's arguably a feature for interoperability that they didn't get any breaking changes for a decade.
You could do a lot in Word 97. I remember trying to use WordPerfect to write a screenplay around that time, and their code scheme simply couldn't scale to a couple hundred pages with dozens of style changes per page. When I converted to .doc and Word, the file was about 20% the size and performance had to be 10x faster.
Yes, it was on a 80 MHz computer, but heck, some people were stuck with 80 MHz computers back then.
This probably reflects that a lot of IE installs are on managed desktops where IT picks when the browser is updated. Firefox doesn't play in that market.
I imagine that consumers with IE installed upgrade at a rate a lot closer to the Firefox rate.
It's probably more an issue of the IE number capturing from two big demographics, while Firefox only frone ones of those.
Were Firefox to ever get big in the enterprise, it'd only get updated on the standard corporate image refresh cycles too.
I have to say some talk about "bloat" like like GWB talked about "government" sometimes...
Aero Glass is slow like 3D software rendering is fast.
Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?
Because it does it better?
In my world (media), it's really hard to use XP after Vista, because it kills me to be using my CPU to be rendering graphics the GPU can do better. Much smoother GUI performance, particularly under load. Aero Glass is probably the most misunderestimated feature of Vista and Win 7, since many assume it'll hurt performance. But with a DX9 capable GPU, it's a very nice boost in both experience and CPU load.
Also, the whole media pipeline is a lot faster, particularly on lower-end machines and with higher-end media. An even bigger jump than XP > Vista was.
You can create content with a lot of software products out there and use maybe the best encoder possible for free, as it's open source.
...and there aren't a huge number of WMV encoders out there? Plenty for free.
Silverlight 3 will support MPEG-4 files with H.264 as well, so that's not going to be an ongoing issue anyway.
With Silverlight you can only work with WMV or Microsoft technologies and you have to pay royalties and buy the video codec.
In what scenario would you pay codec royalites with Silverlight and not with Flash? H.264 and VC-1 are both MPEG-LA licensed codecs with similar terms.
here's a tip for you. Open your silverlight player, run a movie. This one is decoded with hardware acceleration, with overlay mode and all the tricks possible to keep the cpu usage low.
Silverlight 2 doesn't use GPU acceleration. That's being added for Silverlight 3.
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
Sure, there's always an analog hole, but it raises the ante significantly for someone to do it.
And bear in mind that places that are that highly focused on security, cameras are not allowed. People get frisked coming in/out, and even camera phones aren't allowed. So we're talking about a component of defense-in-depth.
As for TSVN, that could certainly work fine for text-only documents, but I don't think it'd work well for design elements of a document, which can also be previewed. There's a lot of power in being able to get a print preview of differenet stages of the document, seeing what edits who made, toggling between markup view and final view, etcetera.
There's an audience for whom TSVN would work, but that's not that audience we're taking about. And there's a lot of value in enabling people from multiple companies to be able to collaborate in the same way.
It's a common programmer assumption that Word==".doc render/editor" and to not understand why Word isn't interchanageable with other seemingly functional .doc render/editors.
But as you suggest, it's the processes more than anything else that are critical to why business perfer to pay for Office than use OpenOffice for free. The more likely a feature is something an OpenOffice advocate claims "no one would use" the more likely it's something of interest to the people not buying OpenOffice. And a big part of that is the collaboration and security features. Being able to flag and encrypt a document so that a screen shot can't be taken of it? Probably sounds like crazy talk to a programmer, but really important for anyone who ants to keep content confidential.
And the whole revision markup collaboration workfow with SharePoint is huge and very broadly used. It's basically a SCM for business documents.
Another way of looking at the story of Word would be:
The Word team was the best at delivering the kind of word processor people want to pay money for.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are very good at the things that people who purchase software for big enterprises are willing to pay for. There's tons of features that may seem incredibly beside-the-point for the needs of a programmer. But programmers don't sign off on a lot of big purchase orders for word processing or office productivity software.
As to your other point, I would say the tech companies that survive and thrive are the ones who pull off a successful synthesis of technology and business focus. And that definitely requires a rare leader who combines talent in both areas, or more commonly good collaboration between the technical and business focused staff.
It's no healthier for the hackers to look down on the suits than for the suits to look down on the hackers. The most fun technical projects I've worked on are those where the technical folks have a real sense of how their efforts fund their own paychecks. Information flow and mutual respect are the keys here.
Exactly. The problem isn't that IE6 was a bad browser for its era. The problem is that lots of people haven't upgraded to a more recent version, which is typical of the corporate managed desktop market.
IE7's been on the market for, what 2.5 years now? How many people are still running 2.5 year old versions of Firefox or Safari on thier personal desktops? Not many. And that's not something about IE in particular, but of some markets where IE is dominant. I don't imagine many avid gamers on Windows are running IE6, as a counterexample.
Had Windows bundled Netscape instead of IE, it'd be Netscape we'd be griping about today. But the real issue is how slow corporate desktops are to get updated for ANYTHING not required for security or line-of-business.
Windows Media Player 9, which was released back in 2003, has only become standard in corporate America in the last year or so, and there are some holdouts even there.
The OP mentions that this is not available for the Mac version of the Expression suite.
This is because that doesn't exist. The Expression Media product is cross-platform, as it is a new version of iView, a cross-platform product Microsoft purchased.
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media
The other products in Expression Studio began life as Windows-only products, and remain so.
That said, The Expression Professional Subscription does include a license for Parallels, so I suppose it's supported on Mac in that sense :).
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/ProfessionalSubscription.aspx
Perhaps this is more an issue about Windows' dominance on managed corporate desktops.
IE6 is the version that gets most of the ire about compatibility. But the current version is IE8, which is quite standards compliant, and IE7 was much better in that regard than IE6.
Looking at the browser history timeline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
IE6 came out October 2001, the same month as Netscape 6.2, and the better part of a year before Mozilla 1.0 was released. Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet? Does anyone still regularly test sites against either?
How much of this is because non-IE browsers aren't commonly used in the enterprise, and thus older versions of them don't wind up deployed nearly as long?
The correct way to do something like this is to archive the full lossless version on the media server with a big drive, and then only sync the lossy portion to the device. That would require some new player functionality, but is presumably what Thomson intended, although that's not how it's described in the article. That's how past proposals along this line were supposed to work.
That said, its not clear that there's a meaningful advantage in doing lossy + diff versus just doing a lossy + lossless as seperate tracks. Transcoding at sync is lightning fast anyway; I'm not sure what advantage there is doing it in advance.
The idea of a lossy + lossles layer isn't new: DTS has done it for several years now. And the idea of a lossy + enhancement layer has been around even longer, in MP3Pro, HE AAC, and WMA 10 Pro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTS-HD_Master_Audio
For HD DVD and Blu-ray authoring, the CineVision PSE system we designed for VC-1 used a hybrid spatial/temporal model.
First, the codec itself was 4-way threaded, encoding each 1920x1080 frame as four slices. Then the file was distributed across multiple blades, each processing a section of the video. Since this was for disc-authoring, we knew where chapters were going to be in advance, and so split by chapter; ideally you'd have at least 2x as many chapters as workers.
The key to avoiding the "chunk transitions" was aligning along chapters, since they almost always start at a scene change or a black frame, so it'd be easy to see the problem. Also, there is extensive 3rd pass support to manually tweak a transition that could go wrong. There was a fair amount of workflow that had to get baked in to get full advantage of the paralleization, like prepopulating each worker with the source during the 1st pass and keeping it cached for the 2nd and potentially 3rd passes.
Anyway, it works nicely; that product was used for 90% or so of HD DVD titles and about a third of Blu-ray titles so far. Last I heard, the record for a 2 hour movie encode was about 6 hours for 2 passes. I'm sure it'd be faster yet with more recent processors. That scaled up to 64-128 cores pretty well, given source chapters. With overlapping scene detection in the first pass, it could be scalable well beyond that for long-form content. Of course, with short content you're not so worried about end-to-end encoding time, but full throughput.
As suggested earlier, live streaming is that hard stuff, since you can't do significant temporal slicing without adding a whole lot of latency.
We have a similar kind of issue with Smooth Streaming for Silverlight, where we encode the same source in multiple bitrates, and need to make sure GOPs are aligned across all the data rates for seamless switching. For an example of that:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Behind-the-Scenes-at-SmoothHDcom-Encoding-Big-Buck-Bunny/
I'd be curious to hear how well it works.
Their Silverlight 2 support's in alpha now, targeting beta in May and final in September.
http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap
Less than 11 months until the Vancouver WInter Olympics in Silverlight! I'm sure they'd appreciate any help in their Hackathon:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking
And the specs to see what needs to be complied to? Oh wait...
here it is. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm
Unless you meant the spec for XAML, which you could find at http://robrelyea.com/silverlight/xvSpec
Or perhaps the SMPTE spec for VC-1 ala http://www.smpte.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a135f13b173a982bb71f1cd3ee4403671fcf2057
Moonlight 2.0 builds that support Silverlight 2.0.
Mono has a hackathon going:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking
Which lists the areas they're looking for help with.
You need to buy from your competitors in order to compete against them?
Bear in mind that A) Silverlight is free, and B) there's an in-progress GPL'ed version of it.
In the classic GNU/Linux tradition, wouldn't the appropriate respose for any users wanting features not supported in Moonlight to add those features to Moonlight?
Has anyone actually tried the site in the Moonlight 2.0 builds yet?
The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.
I don't think anythig uses QuickTime streaming (RTSP) for content delivery. There's plenty of http progressive download with QuickTime, but that's something else.
If you like Server 2008 as a workstation, you're liking Vista as a workstation. It's the same kernel with different services on by default. You can just turn off the services you don't want on Vista quite easily, and get an essentially identical experience.
And with decent server-class equipment, even the default install of Vista should outperform that of XP for typical use. There's a lot to be said for pushing the CPU hit of rendering the GUI to the GPU.