Posted on 04/16/2007 6:43:01 AM PDT by JohnSheppard
Seeing as the rise of YouTube and Google video has pretty much made Adobe's Flash the de facto standard for web streaming, you'd have to be a fool to try and introduce a browser plugin for a new format. Either a fool, or a company with deep pockets. How deep? Try "This is madness! This is Sparta!" deep. Yeah, it's Microsoft.
Their Silverlight plugin, which works not only with IE, but with Safari and Firefox (ha ha, Opera users) and essentially provides a browser plugin that lets everyone stream WMV files like they do with flash files.
The improvement upon flash—and this is why people would want to use this instead of Adobe's—is that it's high def. We don't have to explain to you how much better it would be to stream high def TV shows from NBC or ABC if you missed them when they first aired. And with MLB, Netflix and others already supporting the format, Microsoft may already have some hope of dethroning flash.
streaming HD is great, but it seems like a bandwidth killer. That is the biggest problem with sites like YouTube is video quality, but I really don’t see many younger kids as caring all that much. If you look at video games market, Sony and Microsoft put big bucks into getting the best performance for hi-def video games, but the lower def underpowered Wii is the king with its cool controller.
Yes, HD WMV looks incredible, but the files are huge.
If it doesn’t run on Linux or Solaris, forget about it.
Heh, nice sarcasm... nah, I don't expect it to run on my Linux or Sun boxes.
But that's why I have a Win + Mac + Linux + UNIX + ... philosophy about my machines. Whatever comes out is bound to run on at least -one- of them...
I'm actually very pleased that Microsoft is willing to make it available for other-than-IE7 browsers at all. That's a huge shift -- they used to have enough clout that they could make things "IE-on-Windows-only" and people would form a line around the block to suck up to it.
Solaris, huh? Nah, I only run Solaris for xterm logins; I can't stand its GUI, truth be told.
I hate to see Adobe take it on the chin, but I do think Flash has lived its life and is due for replacement. I like the portability, but if MS does its job right on Silverlight, it'll be a good replacement for Flash.
Although I'll have to do something about supporting it on the Linux boxes... I use Linux as my main platform these days, and it's a little annoying to switch off just for videos.
I didn't find the GUI to be anything special, either. My initial reaction was two fold: why are they trying to make UNIX look exactly like Windows? and why the heck did they pick GNOME to do it (nothing against GNOME, but why not just customize KDE? it's closer in appearance anyway)?
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