Today Microsoft launched its latest effort to "Light up the web", Silverlight 3 which is now available for download.Silverlight has come a long way since its version 1.0 launched in 2007. It has even attracted big players like Netflix who use it as their primary video player. 3.0 brings a host of improvements such as "Smooth Streaming" and "out of browser experiences". Web developers will also appreciate the built in support for GPU acceleration.
Silverlight 3 introduces more than 50 new features, including 3D support, GPU acceleration, H.264 video support and out-of-the-browser capabilities to Silverlight.. The out-of-browser support will enable developers to build applications that work like Adobe's AIR plugin. Dramatic video performance and quality improvements are also included.
One of my personal favorite features of 3.0 is the inclusion of Microsoft's Smooth Streaming, the development of which was spearheaded by the Zune team. First shown at this year's E3, Smooth streaming allows you to watch 720P+ video instantly… with no buffering. You can see sample of how it works at the official site http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming .Silverlight & Smooth Streaming was most recently used during Michael Jackson's memorial service at the Staples Center live in Los Angeles. The quality and scaling was amazing, it could take the Live stream from sub-YouTube quality to 720P+ in a matter of seconds .
Only time will tell if Silverlight can make market share progress against Flash, but if 3.0 is any indication of future releases of Silverlight. Flash may want to start keeping an eye in its rearview mirror.
I ran some quick unscientific tests to see how Silverlight & Flash stacked up when it came to CPU useage. They where tested on a Quad Core PC with 4 GB's of ram. I tested a Youtube "HQ" stream Vs Silverlight Smooth Streaming in HD. As you can see from the results, Silverlight not only had lower CPU usage, but it also used the four cores more uniformly.
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Silverlight 3.0 is available for download right now at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx
Using http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming
Under Vista 64...the cleanest, smoothest, fastest playing browser was...
Google Chrome
Opera was jerky
IE8-32 couldn't keep the data stream maxxed
Firefox 3.5 was jerky and had the slowest frame rate
At least it's Apples to Apples.
On OSX - Safari, Fx3.5 - 24fps constant. Opera splutters for a little bit then settles at 24.
Plenty of bandwidth so that never changed.
Last edited by Septimus on 10 Jul 2009 - 10:52
Using http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming
Under Vista 64...the cleanest, smoothest, fastest playing browser was...
Google Chrome
Opera was jerky
IE8-32 couldn't keep the data stream maxxed
Firefox 3.5 was jerky and had the slowest frame rate
At least it's Apples to Apples.
i just played it in FF 3.5 w/o a hitch. using vista 64-bit too.
What will effect it is you doing stuff in the background (When I was playing it, an app popped up an UAC dialog, it cut the stream quality down due to the sudden CPU usage)
Actually Windows Mobile 7 is expected to RTM October, and be on phones next year, so not much longer to wait
+1
Just now I saw my updates included Windows Live add-ons, which installs Silverlight with it.
Your boss should learn to adapt to whats best for his (potential) customers.
Indeed.
I think I value actual metrics and usage statistics to your totally unfounded claims. The fact is, and it's proven time and again, that unless you have 0 competitors even a slow load time will probably cost you a visit.
Er, why? As a matter of principle, or... ?
And I don't think using a VM to run expression blend is all that big of a deal at this point. Who knows in the future they could make OSX versions of the tools, but first things first, you have to get it going on your own platform as well.
Partially because I don't feel like supporting Microsoft in their quest to push a new standard that makes me dependent on Windows if I were to develop something for it. More importantly, I haven't come across any websites on a daily basis that actually use it. Beyond microsoft.com that is.
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/silverlight3/default.aspx
sure it is, microsoft doesn't offer an ide for mac, but strictly speaking you can always edit the xaml/c# files yourselves without expression blend/visual studio.
Also novell makes a c# ide that can compile your .net projects on either linux or mac or windows
You'd rather there was only Flash?
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/
Any self-respecting developer first trials something out and then accepts/dismiss it. Apparently you just fast forwarded the whole process. I feel bad for you because SL is about x100 better than Flash. Or maybe x101, dunno
To develop on OS X, you need two things -- a license for a virtualization software ($$), and a license for Windows XP or whatever ($$$), either that or set up Boot C... Well, you see where this is going. Lots and lots of effort to support a niche plugin.
The option being the officially unsupported aformentioned Eclipse variant.
I don't think it's naive to dismiss something based on this. It's really not as suitable for OS X development as Flash. Good native development tools would perhaps not be essential if Silverlight was alone in the market, but it has competition here, competition that dominates the market.
Last edited by Jugalator on 10 Jul 2009 - 12:06
No, he just doesn't want to install the plugin at all, out of principle. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense TBH.
You might not be able to do it on OS X using Microsofts tools, but Check out Mono, and MonoDevelop might be able to do it
they shud have a test site using silverlight and see how it goes. id be more than happy to switch to silverlight
They just dropped the use of any specific codec so you can use whatever you feel like. Which I feel is a bad idea, some like it that way though.
I create content almost entirely on the Mac, so H.264 etc are the default I work in, but you can't knock the codecs available to WMV containers.
I create content almost entirely on the Mac, so H.264 etc are the default I work in, but you can't knock the codecs available to WMV containers.
I don't know any codecs really, I look at it from a different angle. I'd much rather see specific settings set for SD and HD videos in the spec so you know that whatever browser and or whatever codec you get the same res and the same bitrate and so on. Be it WMV or h264 or Xvid etc.
Last thing I wanna see is people going with whatever funky encodes they come up with that might or might not play well in a browser etc.
So Silverlight solves Google's bandwidth problems? :o
and cant seem to install silverlight 3. keep geetin installation failed
Last edited by Soldiers33 on 09 Jul 2009 - 19:53
and cant seem to install silverlight 3. keep geetin installation failed
That's because you have installed the Silverlight Developer Components (Silverlight SDK etc.) on your machine, they will probably release that version later today or tomorrow.
and cant seem to install silverlight 3. keep geetin installation failed
That's because you have installed the Silverlight Developer Components (Silverlight SDK etc.) on your machine, they will probably release that version later today or tomorrow.
ok thx for the info
Aye, fine on Fx3.5 here.
Where, exactly? The intro section is Flash...
The main page supports silverlight if you have it, check out the page in IE to see it working properly. It's a little screwed up in chrome here, and doesn't work at all with firefox: http://uploader.ws/upload/200907/silverlight.jpg
Last edited by Memnochxx on 09 Jul 2009 - 22:51
and what the f*ck? its a wonder it ain't working under firefox, you MAY want to unblock the domain for use with silverlight....
you sir, fail
http://www.yazilimevi.biz/
Basically this person created an OS out of silverlight. It's a little glitchy but it works. It just shows the potential of silverlight which is huge.
http://www.yazilimevi.biz/
Basically this person created an OS out of silverlight. It's a little glitchy but it works. It just shows the potential of silverlight which is huge.
Do you realize how many AJAX web OSes and "cloud computing" front ends already exist? Yeah, it's nice that Silverlight is able to do the same thing three years later. Is it easier to work with? Any advantages over using AJAX?
That kinda depends on the quality of the source file, and the limits placed on the serving web server though. I'm betting Silverlight is capable of going higher than was shown in the demo.
I too with for quick and painful death of Flash... but it will not go that fast...
Flash causes more crashes in IE than you can shake your stick at.
I just hope it doesn't get abused for gimmicky animations on pages where there really doesn't need to be any. "With great power comes great responsibility".
It already is.
Some sliding pictures and fading text as you hovered on things, and that was all.
http://www.blender.org/
for more info.
Just because SL is relatively new you can't say you dont understand the point of it. Its like saying: "I dont understand the point of linux when windows dominates the market".
SL is VASTLY superior to flash in every conceivable way. I challenge anyone to tell me ONE thing that flash does better than SL.
Easy - elearning. I develop training simulations for technical auto repairs. Silverlight is a total joke in that area, they have no animation IDE's that allow you to do that to the level of the flash IDE (blend is really an interface ide). Flash is a vastly superior platform end to end elearning content development. It's way better in a workflow of animator-ui designer-developer. MS just does not bother with the animator part.
There's your one!
There's your one!
Blend does have a animation IDE the "Animation Workplace" with a timline and setting keyframes.
Its called Akamai.
I will do that right now!
Tried it, gives an error message after it tries to play for about one minute. This was real GPRS though, not even EDGE. My guess is that it would work with EDGE.
My personal experience with Flash video is not good at all. And there is always the quality factor; something Silverlight addresses in great way with MS encoder and their developer tools...
However, Silverlight stills need to penetrate a little more to make sites and content creator to switch to it.
Try a Youtube Flash HD Vs Silverlight HD.
Things are goint to be worse more for Flash
And second, to make a real client comparison, you should test the HD content given by the same server, with the same bandwidth and HW parameters - just to ensure that "IIS streaming" has got something better than the Flash mechanisms.
All in all, let's wait for the coming Flash Player release
And second, to make a real client comparison, you should test the HD content given by the same server, with the same bandwidth and HW parameters - just to ensure that "IIS streaming" has got something better than the Flash mechanisms.
All in all, let's wait for the coming Flash Player release
Flash spiked on 2 cores at some point there. What if those spikes translated into stuttering? I'd prefer a stable low cpu usage all day.
I cannot see the html tag come to fruition ... AFAIK it doesn't do live-buffer, scale as beautifully or support all these platform without installing 3rd party codec (and the need to encode them, here silverlight will do that for you).
I am afraid to question about it but, whats in the hell a person want to have 30 pron videos running at once?.
The only limiting is to install silverlight outside Windows and OSX, silverlight is not compatible with linux, for linux you can install moonlight.
Then later on it says Opera support will be officially added with future builds, so it doesn't even take 3.0 into account. And also says Linux and it's browsers are supported through Novell with Moonlight.
So again, how the hell does it not work the same across all OSes and browsers?
And where does it actually say it "can't be included" in major distros? All another distro has to do is get it from Novel or a Intermediate Recipient" and that it must be "not licensed under GPLv3 or a Similar License".
Nothing there stops any other distro from getting moonlight from the Mono people. Or from you getting it after.
And as for distribution of Moonlight with distros, their "covenant not to sue" cannot be inherited, so third parties that wish to distribute it in their distribution cannot include it, so not all distros can ship with it or include it in their repositories.
All of this sets an uneven landscape for developing software.
Then again, i love them for the tools they invented in the first place.
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