[PLUG-Devel] Hi all

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 00:29 -0700, Tim Heuer wrote: 
> As far as windows media player on the web...you could use it but not 
> get x-plat for it.  Silverlight becomes a sweet spot for those 
> organizations that have an investment in windows media streaming services 
> especially...they don't have to re-encode to a lower quality and can 
> actually get higher quality for premium content.  To people like MLB, 
> Netflix, WWE, etc. that is important.  To the "youtube" video type 
> things, it may not be.  But Silverlight delivers a x-play windows media 
> codec (the media supported is WMV, WMA and MP3).

I'm not sure I entirely understand this... are you saying that Microsoft
sees Silverlight as a way to deliver Internet video?  Basically an
end-around to the Cable and Sat providers?  Do you expect there to be
"Silverlight broadcasts" of live content in the future?

> For the process I use for using SVG assets in XAML (or converting them I 
> should say) you can check my blog for a screencast I did recently.  
> Basically open SVG file in Inkscape, save as PDF.  Microsoft's expression 
> tools can import PDF (which is essentially the same format as .AI) into 
> their design tools and emit XAML.  There are other vendors making this 
> process simpler (you can search for tools) and also some doing some Flash 
> to XAML conversions (http://theconverted.ca).  The SVG document itself 
> isn't directly supported, but you can get re-use out of those assets with 
> simple conversion.  I hope that makes sense.

It makes sense, but seems pretty convoluted.  If nothing else, the PDF
output in Inkscape isn't that great, and the requirement of using
Expression doesn't work to well for Linux users.

I haven't seen a spec on the XAML format (is there one?) but from the
examples that I've seen it looks to inherit most of it's graphic
elements from VML.  Is that the case?

If so, it would seem that converting from SVG to XAML would be a pretty
straight forward conversion (mostly just removing things not supported).
Would Microsoft be interested in making something like an XSLT sheet or
utility to do that?  It would give a path for Linux developers to build
XAML documents for their Moonlight applications.

> Codecs -- always a tough one.  With the goal of keeping the plugin size 
> small, there are some tradeoffs.  These are the same tradeoffs anyone 
> faces.  With a goal of Silverlight to deliver great rich media experiences 
> via the web and serve customers with streaming services, we made a choice.
> We chose a video standard that had high quality capabilities and 2 audio 
> formats.  The more we add (in addition to licensing concerns) the more we 
> increase the size.  And if Microsoft included OGG or other OSS platforms 
> here, I'd pose the same question back to you... How do I know I got the 
> good ones?  How do I know what good is?  How do I know there isn't a man 
> in the middle?

I understand that at some point you have to choose.  If OGG was a
downloadable module, you'd have the same issues.  But, the real
advantage of using OGG would be that it doesn't need to be downloadable
at all.  And that, does solve the download problem :)

> Mac and PPC binaries -- good question, I'll research.
> Out of browser experiences for Moonlight -- I don't know, but will research.

Thanks for looking into these.  While your asking, ARM would be
interesting too.  I imagine that if you guys are supporting WinCE that
you'd have ARM binaries also.  I know that they have Mono running in the
Nokia 770 and 800s, so Moonlight could be a candidate there also.

		--Ted

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