RSSSilverlight 4 to do for PCs what HD DVD couldn't
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published September 9, 2009, 2:14 PM
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that the company is planning to demonstrate technology currently being planned for version 4 of Silverlight, its media distribution platform based on .NET, designed to provide both an interactivity layer and digital rights management services for movie studios and other content providers. These services, the company now says, are intended to "enable movie studios and retailers to provide the same rich interactive experiences via digital copy and Internet distribution as consumers get with DVD or Blu-ray."
As many DVD and Blu-ray Disc collectors already know, "digital copy" in this instance refers to a separate file distributed with a disc that usually plays in ordinary DVD or BD players, but which plays interactively on PCs. If Microsoft's plan as it currently describes it becomes successful, movie discs produced in the near future could bear the Silverlight logo.
Microsoft "buried the lede," in this case, in an announcement late yesterday that ostensibly referred to the company's pending demonstration next week at a broadcasting conference in Amsterdam, of the next generation of streaming media for its Internet Information Services Web server platform, which is being upgraded to version 7.5 for Windows Server 2008 R2. But that streaming platform is for Web sites that publish video; arguably, you don't need IIS to watch a disc. Or at least you shouldn't, perhaps except for the fact that Microsoft is intending Silverlight 4 to pave the way for its latest DRM platform. PlayReady DRM was announced in 2007, and Microsoft's first partnerships were revealed a full year and a half ago.
But that was when the platform was being discussed as the "mobile version" of Microsoft's desktop-level DRM, which either was being called PlaysForSure or waiting on a new name, depending upon whom at Microsoft one asked. Now it appears that name will be PlayReady; and this week's news appears to indicate its lead-off product will not be on mobile platforms after all.
Though distribution of Silverlight 3 has been ongoing for the last two months, and what was described as an "official launch" took place last July 10, Microsoft held what its marketing team described as an "official Silverlight 3 launch event" yesterday at the Amsterdam conference. There, S3 shared the stage with Expression 3, the company's Web development system geared toward designers, which utilizes the S3 platform. But the "official" official launch event appears to have been the debut, at least in the public conscience, of Silverlight 4, with what promises to be a next-generation smooth streaming system building on the 1080p, H.264-based model that debuted in S3.
Conceivably, movie discs bearing the Silverlight logo may very well also make use of the IIS 7.5 Web platform, essentially as an authentication system for S4's PlayReady DRM.
That's a great call by the NFL imho.
Score: -1
|In other news, NFL isn't going to make the same mistakes that MLB did, and are deploying and sticking with Silverlight as their main option.
http://nbcsports.msnbc.c.../32480856/ns/sports-nfl/
In case anyone missed all the MLB fallback when they moved to Flash for the loss in video quality, go see the user outrage in Sports Forums.
Score: -1
|right now i obviously have Adobes Flash installed but if i had the choice, every site i visit would use Silverlight
would be great if sites supported both Flash and Silverlight so those of us with common sense could switch to SL, remove Flash and enjoy smooth sailing lol
'buffering, buffering...'
you know it still happens on YouTubes servers ;P
Score: 1
|Buffering has nothing to do with flash or silverlight.
Score: -1
|Technically you are 'somewhat' correct about buffering, as it bandwidth and state of your Internet connection that creates buffering.
However, as this user and most people have noticed, the two technologies deal with buffering in slightly different ways.
This lets Silverlight handle flaky or low quality connections better than Flash. Flash's model tries to shove a constant bitrate and doesn't re-assess the buffering times. This makes Flash seem silly when it buffers for 5 secs at a time and plays 2 secs of video then buffers again, repeat...
Silverlight will attempt to buffer based on the current state of the connection and will increase the buffer time so that the video isn't playing like a skipping record.
Silverlight also can 'downsample' the content quality if the bitrates are available on the server, so that you can move from an HD video connection all the way down to a bitrate viewable on 56K to 2G level connection. (See Netflix as an example of this.)
Score: -1
|"Conceivably, movie discs bearing the Silverlight logo may very well also make use of the IIS 7.5 Web platform, essentially as an authentication system for S4's PlayReady DRM."
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
Then no one will be able to watch movies on their Mac and/or Linux, Unix,... boxes!
(Because of lacking compatibility.)
Score: -2
|Wrong...again:
http://fileforum.betanew...r-Mac-OS-X/1165253904/2
http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
Score: -1
|Seriously? FAIL for not researching BEFORE posting.
Score: -1
|I think Silverlight is posing a real thread to Flash. Yes Flash has the market penetration and so on, but technology wise Silverlight is catching up fast,
and it may only be a matter of time until people start switching to it for rich web applications.
Streaming video in Silverlight is vastly supperior to Flash.
To check Silverlight smooth streaming just head to Vuze HD Network. Plenty of videos there using this technology.
(http://www.vuze.com/content/Gateway.html).
Not only that but if you search for info regarding cpu performance usage between Flash and the latest Silverlight you'll find plenty of articles giving Silverlight a big edge. BubbleMark is a good example. (http://bubblemark.com/)
Both Flash and Silverlight are proprietary so supporting one or another doesn't really push forward any web standards like HTML 5 video tag.
But anyway, thats the state of the web were in today. From a tech perspective, If I had to pick between Flash and Silverlight, right now, I would pick Silverlight. But from a business point of view, penetration is everything. Flash is available "out-of-the-box" in most browsers. And some big media websites give a huge support to Flash (youtube). I wouldn't be surprised to see Silverlight pre instaled in future Microsoft browsers if it doesn't already in Windows 7. But they also need to catch some big media websites so that there is enough of an audience that wants Silverlight to come pre instaled in other browsers such as Firefox and so on. Youtube is not an option for this for obvious reasons. Google isn't going to make Microsoft job any easier in this respect.
Score: -2
|IgnorantFatty: Read this post, you ignorant moron
Score: -3
|Flash is 24FPS but what FPS can Silverlight do? Fast action scenes look paged in Flash videos. That's all I care about in who's better at video content. I roll my eyes when people say flash is as good as DVD. Uh no, not by a long shot.
FPS = Frames per second
Score: -1
|No idea why anyone would use the proprietary, patent encumbered, Silverturd when Flash works much better for streaming video. Microsoft sure loves DRM, my god. The only way Silverturd will get on any of my machines is when Microsoft force downloads it.
Score: -10
|Funny how you mention Silverlight being patent-encumbered and proprietary (implying such is a Bad Thing™) and then suggest an equally patent-encumbered and proprietary alternative.
Hypocrisy, thy name is fathead....
"Flash works much better for streaming video"
Source? Didn't think so.
Score: 5
|It isn't just Microsoft that likes DRM. Have you noticed what also gets passed with the signal on an HDMI or Display Port. Both of those pass DRM data. Expect in 18 to 24 months that all HD content will be DRM protected and only allow display on HDCP compliant divices.
Score: -1
|Flash does work better then Silverlight... no source needed. Have you not visited youTube, MLB (who abandoned silverlight in favor of flash) or the millions of other sites that have figured out the same thing on their own. Source? Do you use the web or are you that f*ing stupid?
The reality here is that Flash has Silverlight beat hands down in everything (lets not forget Microsoft initially tried to advertise Silverlight as an attack on Adobe Air, not Flash, which also failed). Microsoft knows this or they wouldn't be thinking outside the box to try and find a niche where Silverlight can be justified. Until Microsoft finds that niche, Silverlight will continue to be the joke it currently is today. DRM might actually be a good idea for Silverlight as this is an area where Microsoft has far more expertise than Adobe.
Score: -6
|"Flash does work better than Silverlight"
Um, no...
1) Silverlight can scale video so that you can literally move from a fiber connection to a wifi to a 3g cellular to a 2g celular connection and if the bitrates are included, the video will automatically downsample and continue to play. (See Netflix for an example)
2) Silverlight is NOT LOCKED to any codec. So Silverlight can use the same codec Flash is using if that is the 'quality' people want to use.
3) Silverlight's navive WMV codec is VC1, which is a richer and higher quality codec than Flash's HD codec. VC1 is what you get on MOST Blu-Ray Discs you buy, as even the movie industry prefers the VC1 quality on high resolution content.
4) Silverlight when used with video acceleration features (often not used in current implementations) offsets the CPU usage to virtually nothing where Flash even with 'attempting to use acceleration' will eat 40-80% of the CPU.
5) Silverlight is properly threaded. Flash starting with v9 added in threading and messed it up horribly, so that any users with HT or low powered dual-core processors suffer worse framerates than before Flash tries to thread its processing. Flash 10 still suffers from the same threading flaws and even can bring an i7 9xx CPU to its knees because the i7 CPUs have HT enabled and Flash is stupid about using the HT Virtual CPU instead of the natural cores. (Look it up)
There is no instance that Flash is 'better' than Silverlight at video, from low end bandwidth to the pure quality Silverlight can offer with VC1 (WM9).
Score: -2
|Um no. the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverlight have moved back to Flash as it scales better and offers better quality. Not to mention it supports all the major OSes and numerous devices. Hate to bring facts into your Microsoft talking points. Get those from one of their Best Buy propaganda slideshows?
Score: -7
|@PC_Tool or Artfuldodger or whatever username you post under today:
my point being why replace one with the other for no reason other than to extend Microsoft's desktop monopoly onto the web? Source, is look at the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverturd, which are switching back to Flash because it scales better and supports more platforms.
Score: -8
|Source?
Score: 1
|How much does Adobe pay YOU?
Better quality? Why don't you try backing that up with some links that have some meat to them. Not just "Oh look YouTube uses it. That means it must be the best, because YouTube is obviously the best." Find me an article that shows that Flash is TECHNICALLY better than Silverlight, and not just dealing strictly on install base. The onus is on you my friend.
Not all sites are switching back either. One great example is NetFlix. Sometimes Flash is the easier way to go, as it had it's headstart there are far more people that have it installed. This leads to lower support calls. As the install base grows they may elect to use it again, or they may choose something else entirely.
Either way, man you are flat out off base on this one with no backup.
Score: 0
|One of the challenges that Silverlight is still facing is multi-platform compatibility. Even though MS Windows dominates the market, Mac/Safari and Linux users still have no easy way to see Silverlight-powered content. That is the main reason why many companies are delaying adoption of Silverlight, and why some switched back to Flash. Technically, Silverlight is better in many respects. Practically, it is lacking compatibility compared to Flash/Flex. And, until SL runs on all platforms, Flash/Flex most likely will dominate the market.
Score: -1
|While i agree in some cases ( or even most cases now ) Sliverlight is better then Flash 10. There are few points that is toally wrong
VC 1 is not superior to H,264
VC 1 is not the default usage in Blu Ray
And Some how Sliverlight 3 now Defaults to H.264
Score: 1
|Silverlight uses sandboxing, what about flash? no it doesn't
Score: 2
|No one is paying me for saying stuff but flash is definatelly better because of a few reasons:
Better market penetration.
More democratic: more platforms because Adobe is platform neutral.
Microsoft is not which makes it unreliable for support.
Most websites using silverlight ARE paid/talked to by Microsoft.
NBL reverted to flash because silverlight didn't work and Flash does for their website, needs.
About the acceleration, this is rather new and Microsoft is now with Silverlight 4 exploring it and even if Silverlight 4 is going to be the first to market. Flash still can catch up anyway because most computers don't have recent cards with the acceleration and GPGPU-standards enabled drivers. This makes acceleration irrelevant because not many people will notice this.
What's the CPU usage of silverlight without the acceleration? Obviously not mentioning that and comparing accelerated Silverlight to not accelerated Flash is biased.
Not accelerated performance is still very important because that's what most people have.
Furthermore, so far these where unbiased facts, now my biased opinion.
Microsoft sucks, avoid all lock-in and incoming silverthurds. Al Microsoft products have the habit to having a good, solid upgrade timetable. (For some reason, there is always an upgrade on the horizon.)
Being slow is one of the characteristics of a MS product.
Score: -5
|Right on!
Score: -4
|I will give you the multi-platform. I've always felt MS should embrace more platforms. I am not sure why some posters are saying it doesn't work on Mac. I am ON Mac.... and it works just fine. Unless we're talking some antique PPC here.
SL3 does acceleration.... right now.... today.... released.
Compare Hulu to Netflix, or even YouTube or take your pick. Flash drives the CPU up and the fans on the laptop come on. I can go through an entire movie on Netflix... no fan spin up. Also alot smoother playback. Flash gets a bit jumpy at times.
All this being said, the simple fact is right now Silverlight is superior. I am not sure why the Flash fanboys here don't want to admit it. If we can admit what *IS* better we can properly design open software that captures these features.
For those that feel the Adobe side is perfect. The number of security flaws experienced by the Flash plugin is just amazing, and here blindly, people will still defend it as the way to go. Fanboism has no boundaries I guess.
Score: 1
|VC1 has been shown to be of comparable quality to H.264 at half the bandwidth (Or better at same bandwidth take your pick). Please check any of the independent codec comparision reviews.
VC1 is pretty much the default in Blu Ray. Check the coding on your blu ray discs and you'll see by far the vast majority of them are indeed VC1 encoded.
Yes, Silverlight can play back H.264, but again, there is no "default". It plays whatever codec it was encoded with.
Score: -1
|Yay for edit timing out. I did a quick check of over 750 bluray discs, of which approximately 36% were encoded with VC-1, and the remaining 64% as AVC (H.264). So it is no longer the default that it once was (The first few batches were almost exclusively either VC-1 or MPEG-2).
Score: -1
|NBL didn't revert to flash because silverlight didn't work. Have you actually looked at their forums? The users were in a total uproar when they switched from silverlight to flash. Most reported a SIGNIFICANT drop in picture quality, frame rate drops, etc etc. If you want a picture perfect sales pitch for silverlight, go stick your head into their forums for a bit. I think it will open most people's eyes quite well.
Score: -1
|VC-1 was never the "default"
Score: -3
|Oh you mean the paid Microsoft shills who astro-turfed the forums?
Score: -4
|@fathead: Yeah, netflix moved back to flash...
Your denial of reality is striking....
"@PC_Tool or Artfuldodger or whatever username you post under today:"
Sorry, not the same person. If you paid any attention at all instead of blindly ranting against anything MSFT, you might notice these things.
"Source, is look at the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverturd, which are switching back to Flash because it scales better and supports more platforms."
Pure BS. Funny how Netflix can continue to gain users and have more "play it now" movies daily and still manage to scale just fine. Who did Microsoft pay? What site switched back and where's the link to them explaining it was because of "scaling"?
FYI: A source has to be credible. You are anything but.
Score: 0
|FACT : I never said Netflix moved off Silverturd
FACT : MLB.com moved off Silverturd and back to Flash.
you know this, but i understand your Microsoft blood will make you deny this reality.
Score: -5
|typical fatty ignorance... It's almost comical to watch the lack of intelligence that he demonstrates...
Score: 1
|Could not have said it better Tool...
Score: 1
|Really? Where is your source that Microsoft paid anyone to use Silverlight? Anything? No? Also, support for major OSes... um, read above, Moonlight for Linux and Silverlight 3.0 for Mac... Granted that mobile device support is behind Flash... one vaild point out of how many? yeah... go back to trolling fatty until you can actually provide proof of something.
Score: 2
|Moonlight for Linux and SL 3.0 for Mac... I fail to see where this is not easy? I have Fedora 11 running in a virtual machine and Moonlight installed... All content plays flawlessly... Where is the issue?
Score: 1
|@fatty What is this Silverturd you keep speaking of?
To be honest, when you start changing names, thinking you are being smart, you loose all credibility, (not that you had any to begin with).
When Netflix first started using SilverLight, I was one of the beta testers. Yes, it had issues, but the quality was much better than flash. Honestly, I have seen some sites done better in flash and some better in Silverlight. And to say that you don't like Silverlight because of DRM??? Flash also uses DRM. It is touted as one of the main features of Flash 9, and why the many mobile platforms have trouble with flash. For a long time, my Wii, PS3 and iPhone had trouble because they supported up to Flash 7. Video on Hulu uses flash 9 or above, as earlier versions didn't support DRM. To be hones, I've had similar problems with Silverlight on the same platforms. My point is that both have DRM and have similar issues that still need to be fixed.
Score: 1
|Fact: You stated "all the major sites" using silverlight had moved back to flash.
Fact: You still provide no credible source as to backing up your reasoning as to why any particular site moved back to flash...and were only able to name *one*.
Fact: You still can't name a site *paid* to use Silverlight...or provide anything resembling a credible citation regarding that claim.
Fact: Nothing you have said has any credibility behind it whatsoever.
Also, please name a major OS that doesn't support Silverlight. Linux, Mac, and Windows all support Silverlight 3. Of course, your next non-relevant argument will be that Microsoft didn't produce the SL3 plugin for Linux...which is always amusing because you also have claimed Silverlight is Bad™ because only Microsoft develops the tools...So show us some more of that patented, proprietary Fathead Hypocrisy™.
Score: 0
|yes they did move from silverlight to flash any idiot can see that but your original statement said this "my point being why replace one with the other for no reason other than to extend Microsoft's desktop monopoly onto the web? Source, is look at the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverturd, which
are switching back to Flash because it scales better and supports more platforms"
More platforms I'll give you but scales better? No. The MLB blamed Silverlight for the problems and when they switched back to Flash, guess what? They still had problems...
http://paidcontent.org/a...verlight-to-adobe-flash/
Oh and here's a source that shows that flash is very hard on the cpu and requires a lot to run it.
http://www.formortals.com/?p=169
Score: 0
|LMAO Tool... EXACTLY on all points...
Score: -1
|"Better market penetration."
Agreed... Flash also had what, a 7 year headstart?
"More democratic: more platforms because Adobe is platform neutral.
Microsoft is not which makes it unreliable for support."
Wrong, SL can run on all the major OSes on the market. Granted, mobile device support, namely, the iPhone and some other Java-based/Symbian OSes are not supported yet is not there and may not be there. Adobe had to jump some major hurdles to get Flash onto most mobile device platforms and still has some major quirks on the non-Java-based platforms.
"Most websites using silverlight ARE paid/talked to by Microsoft."
As I stated to fatty, where is the source for this? Rumor denotes fact? Since when?
"NBL reverted to flash because silverlight didn't work and Flash does for their website, needs."
The NBL never published anything about WHY they reverted to Flash. It could be any number of reasons. If you want to speculate, fine. But don't go posting this as fact when you have no facts to base your speculation on.
Score: 0
|"Um no. the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverlight have moved back to Flash as it scales better "
Are you retarded?
The only sites that have moved back to Flash was based on installed clients, where Flash as a +90% install base and at the time Silverlight was still around 30%.
It wasn't that it 'scaled' better, it was simply more people had the Flash plug-in installed.
It is called simple market math.
Score: 0
|""Um no. the sites Microsoft paid to use Silverlight have moved back to Flash as it scales better "
Are you retarded?"
This is fatty we're talking about here. Do you really have to ask?
Score: -1
|I'll take a silver turd over a regular turd any day. Other than the fact that it would be harder to flush a turd of silver (but who would want to??)
Score: 0
|All part of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to force Silverlight into wider acceptance through strategic partnerships. The Netflix streaming actually works great (better than Flash), but it's just not enough to move people over from the dominant Flash platform.
As a Silverlight dev, the downside of MS concentrating so intensely on its few big corporate partners is that they flesh out the media and DRM components while leaving more basic components incomplete, buggy or absent. The integration with Visual Studio still leaves much to be desired as well.
Score: -1
|Have you tried Eclipse4SL?
(No idea how they compare as I am not a dev, but that's one of the other IDE's I've seen many times in reference to SL coding.)
Betanews recently had an article also on Powerbuilder 12, which incorporated a lot of .Net/Silverlight goodies. http://www.betanews.com/...embraces-NET/1250710851
Hope that helps.
Score: -2
|We've been doing SL3 dev in VS.Net 2008 for the past couple of months and I have to say it's been surprisingly easy. Even most of our junior devs have been able to pick it up quickly. The simple fact that we can leverage our existing data layer without any retooling to deliver SL3 content has been the biggest benefit.
Our shop tried doing Flash to push content and the biggest bane was that we had to wrap web services around our data layers to push data. It was a nightmare and more trouble than it was worth...
Score: -1
|I just removed AIR and shockwave from every machine in my domain. Complete lack of use after two years+ numerous security issues = Adobe ain't paying me to patch it so I consider it dead. Next?
Score: -1
|Flash is the #1 browser based vulnerability in Windows Vista.
Score: 1
|noscript+adblock + seems to keep me working fine. But I agree with you. Acrobat is up there also.
Score: -1
|Who needs AIR or SL to program.
Java applets work, why not use them.
A lot of web applications use or are completely written in Java.
Score: -3
|Because java sucks. It's slow, it has a ton of security problems, hangs/crashes often, and needs an update every other week. No browser on any of my machines can or will run java.
Score: -1
|"Because java sucks. It's slow, it has a ton of security problems, hangs/crashes often, and needs an update every other week. No browser on any of my machines can or will run java."
Huh? Care to back up your rant with anything resembling reality? Java can be very fast, as can just about any programming language. What java security problems? Funny how i do not get updates every other week. My Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and even Internet Exploder run Java fine. As does Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, BSD, etc...
Score: -6
|fatty: java (Programming language)
bopb99/Kingmotley: Java Runtime Environment Plug -in
All different things.
Score: -1
|I expect to see PlayReady fail as miserably as PlaysForSure did...netflix is already streaming video in Silverlight. Works very well. Hope S4 doesn't make it worse.
Score: 2
|well, if i ever need to use something to manage DRM, i have to say, i'd rather use something trusted and easily managed or removed as Silverlight
but besides that, Silverlight is an excellent media streaming platform and App platform, far better than Flash and Air
not that i welcome DRM anywhere ;P but such is life, until the Movie studios wise up they will force companies like Microsoft etc to come up with solutions for them, else we can't play back content on specific devices
Score: -1
|didn't mean as a reply, sorry
Score: -1
|