[PLUG-Devel] Hi all

[Tim Heuer]

There are a few of our customers using Silverlight right now to stream live broadcasts: HSN.tv, Major League Baseball, WWE, Mediapreview.tv, and more coming.  We absolutely see this as a mechanism to leverage existing investments in windows media streaming services (especially through content delivery networks) as well as progressive downloads on non-streaming platforms.

Lack of expression tools on Linux would hurt the scenario I outlined, but again, there are plenty of providers out there working on converter tools that integrate with XAML -- now that I think of it, Inkscape would be an awesome one to have that feature!

XAML Spec/info: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms747122.aspx

ARM -- I assume you mean for Moonlight (supporting the ARM).  Our mobile story is very early right now...i don't have details unfortunately but just got asked to participate in shaping that story, so as I know more I'm happy to communicate.

tim heuer | (602) 405-4567 | im: tim at timheuer.com | blog: http://timheuer.com/blog/


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-devel-bounces at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-devel-bounces at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Ted Gould
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 9:55 PM
To: List for Linux development and software engineering discussions.
Subject: Re: [PLUG-Devel] Hi all

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