Silverlight 3 out of beta, joins forces with your GPU for HD streaming
By Ross Miller 
posted July 9th 2009 9:42PM
posted July 9th 2009 9:42PM
[Via Ars Technica]
Read - Download Page
Read - Smooth Streaming demo
posted July 9th 2009 9:42PM
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So you are saying when one company completely blows away the product from another that is a copy? If no one ever challenged Adobe, flash would stay as crappy as it is. I don't get your logic at all, why is introducing a better product a bad thing? Anyway you know very little about Silverlight, it's a much more powerful development platform than flash. It is not a copy at all.
Silverlight is based off of .Net which allows me (as a developer) to develop application using a real development language (C#). You have no idea the amount of work Microsoft has put into Silverlight and WPF to make it easy for developers. The way they have broken the workflow out to allow designers to be free from coders is also amazing.
I have been working on a Silverlight app the last few weeks, and have been continually impressed by the work Microsoft has done with the technology. Plus I get the added advantage of Mac support for free (something that as a long time Windows developer I would have never done).
Sure they may be competing with Adobe, but this is one area that Microsoft has really evolved, Silverlight is Flash on steroids.
It's called competition. I guess you don't like having choices. You must lose it on the cereal isle.
@bootsjunkie
Stop posting with logic, you're making too much sense around here!
Another useless trollish me-too post by jubei
Trying to pick up the slack for paul and zak?
............I don't think they are trying to monopolize the internet since there's no standardas in RIA's. Wait, how would they monopolize the internet with Silverlight? At least there's more competition with rich internet media multimedia now. Plus, Silverlight is somewhat cross-platform. I don't think releasing another flash equivalent would necessarily be deemed "me-too" thing, since there's hardly any businesses competing with flash. I don't see what's wrong with competition.
Don't know if its been mentioned but this look EXACTLY like the 1080p streaming demo they showed at E3 for the 360. I think this is the secret.
(btw, I ran the demo and I found it to be as revolutionary as flash was when it hit the internet). I was viewing at the full bitrate and it looked all sorts of HD (can't really tell what res).
That's Apple's motto? And here I thought that was Steve Jobs explaining how he liked his coffee.
@ ALBGunner04
Really ? *Opens a vid, hits Command+F* Uhhhh plays full screen here, and its not the Pro version...
Noob question. Will HTML 5 support gpu video playback? I know that you will be able to embed videos directly onto a site, so does that mean that if your video card supports gpu playback of the codec then it will automatically offload to the gpu?
That's not a noob question.
That'd be implementation specific.
Silverlight is a pity. All websites using this technology gives users headaches with compatibility and non-backward compatible medias. Flash rules all the way!
What are you talking about. Isn't silverlight embedded with video codecs. What are you trying to say? You should give your reason why you hate silverlight, or else people will take it offensively.
Woho! I'm so low ranked! @ Peace-whatever: You're right, I rote this in a hurry. Well, for example, a news website which I consult every days choose Silverlight after many years of media streaming. The result was disastrous, not only because practically no readers had this plugin (that's a detail) but mainly because it needed always to be updated to see contents. It was like if the updated Silverlight engine on the server side was unable to stream medias if the clients didn't have the exact same plugin version on his computer, even if the streamed media was identical as it was before.
Comparatively, if your flash plugin is not quite up to date, you can still see streamed contents, unless the document was done with the latest version but even then, you'll probably be able to read it, maybe not adequately but you might be able.
So, this was a slight example of my experience with Silverlight but as bad as it was, I never wanted to be "offensive" to anyone here. Ok, it wasn't version 3 yet. With this new release I hope not to see the same story happen again!
I think that's mostly because it's a pretty new plugin so they make fairly serious changes in between updates. It's not like you can watch any videos if you still only have Flash 5 installed, and back when they first added video codecs everyone would have been forced to update as well or see nothing because videos simply wouldn't be compatible.
The one thing I don't like about streaming video in Silverlight is that you can't just choose to let it buffer to access the higher detail levels, like if you're on a bad connection or the connection to the server isn't the best. If there was more end user control over the detail levels they'd like to see that would be nice because it's pretty annoying to see it fly up and down in detail levels as you're playing a video. I would honestly much rather just let it buffer even for a minute so I get a fairly constant experience.
Alright, so they added it now. Back when I last used QuickTime, it was a Pro feature from what I remember. That says something about QuickTime's quality as a video player that I haven't used it ever since full screen wasn't available to default users.
I can reproducibly crash Firefox 3.0.11 with the Silverlight streaming page and the new version. I can't run Firefox 3.5 here for other reasons, but 3.0.11 should have worked fine.
I ran the test video before installing Silverlight 3 and after. I seen no difference. It ran perfect before and after. However when watching Netflix through the Firefox browser I see no difference between Silverlight 2 or 3. To me the animated video is more of a gimmick than real world results.
I also tested Silverlight 3 with Netflix in Windows Media Center, again I see no difference between Silverlight 2 or 3. I am running Intel Quad Core with 4GB or ram with Nividia graphics. Silverlight 3 has no impovements over the previous version in video quality. It is great that it supports new formats but until I see it in the real world I am not impressed.
I hope I am missing something because I don't like choppy video.
After more research it looks like Silverlight 2 and 3 both support smooth streaming. So hopefully the animated video is not a gimmick and the real thing. Second is that all current videos on Netflix will have to be re-coded to take advantage of the new features.
So looks like things are looking good. Good job Microsoft. Don't expect all the Netflix streams to be smooth as of now.
It mostly just adds GPU acceleration so that your GPU can do the transparencies in animations and videos should be displaying via DirectX just like videos played in Windows Media Player. Although I do think Silverlight 2 was already displaying stuff via DirectX, but apparently the major change is that all the slick animation stuff is rendered on the GPU now.
For example in the streaming demo all the controls and that little bitrate meter look hardware accelerated to me.
OMG you guyz, the logic...IT'S TOO MUCH!!!! Comparing an Operating System to browser plug-in's!!! Paul has won the Internet and I like ice cream!
The first iteration of our new website with more feature videos, demos, case studies and more can be seen at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight. Seethelight.com will launch tomorrow with all of tomorrows private launch event goodness -- silverlight.net for developers will also launch an update in the AM. It's great to see all the positive commentary around what Silverlight 3 brings to the table --- we think competition is good for everyone and we love being able to bring some pretty awesome technology to the developer community. Be sure to check out Expression Blend with SketchFlow -- the prototyping features will blow you away.
Thanks for all your support -- any questions, comments, rants hit me up @bgoldy or bgold@microsoft.com.
Regards,
Brian Goldfarb
Director, Web/UX Platforms
Microsoft Corporation
Excellent update Microsoft.
Slowly the pieces are falling into place and the nails are being hammered into the flash coffin.
Never did like working / developing flash based sites/vids/etc.
This new version is freaking awesome. If netflix switches to this I will have to consider resubscribing. The main reason I canceled was the increase in blu-ray fees. The streaming never worked right (lots of buffering) so it didn't keep me as a member.
Wow, I'm extremely impressed with that demo. Video quality is ridiculously good at max dl speed and using only 20% cpu. Even when I limited the download speed to 600kbps the video is still very watchable with quality similar to that of hulu. Also fast forwarding and pausing is almost instantaneous.
Ok, guys, it's become more than obvious that Paul Chapel works on the Microsoft FUD team. He exists to piss everyone off at Apple fans, making them seem even snootier than normal.
Congrats, Paul, you have accomplished that goal better than any normal Microsoft fan. Now that you have almost single-handedly switched Engadget fans from Apple to Microsoft, please go away so I can see the rest of the arguments on their merit.
I dont't think thats the real paul, the real paul actually tried to troll well. that was pathetic at best
I am very impressed, this is much better than flash. I get a lot of problems playing high-quality flash videos. They're slower, a bit glitchy, etc. This thing let me jump to anywhere on the time line and instantly started playing. The picture is nice, no problems, artifacts, or any other problems. I really wish more people would adopt this, at the very least for the sake of competition. Adobe is way too slow and confident for my tastes.
Noone needs another proprietary, slow format for displaying animations and video. Not with HTML5 coming ...
...how is it possible to compare an operating system to a browser plugin? I don't think Apple has a RIA platform or a internet framework (maybe except Quicktime player); at least, I don't think. I think you mean Apple>MS to YOUR opinion.
I think you need to add the /s modifier... unless you're really serious.
I wish youtube would use this instead of flash.
I've never tried designing a website using Silverlight just yet, I'm hoping that Adobe will jump on the wagon and fully support GPU, because the type of websites I design are incredibly resource heavy and without a fairly good pc, they lag to crap. This is not saying that I wouldn't want to learn to make websites for Silverlight 3, in fact I would be excited right about now if I had learned a while back, but it's so expensive learning something new and being efficient with it. I see great benefits with Silverlight 3 and I hope that they continue to push Adobe to make even higher strides in their updates. If Adobe doesn't step up their game not only I but the rest of the staff will need to learn to work with SL3.
It wasn't free until very recently, and even now the implementation is awful in the windows version.
Honestly quicktime still feels like it did 10 years ago, which isn't a great thing.