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# Wednesday, April 18, 2007
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Finally coming up for air now after 10 hours of press briefings for nearly three days, I can finally talk more here about Silverlight:

 

Top 10 Questions About Silverlight and Media

  1. What media formats do you support?
    A: WMV7,8, 9/SMPTE VC-1, WMA, MP3
  2. What is SMPTE VC-1?
    A: WMV9 - now an open standard recognzied by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and shipping in all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives.
  3. Will Silverlight work with my current Windows Media?
    A: Yes, it most definitely will work with your existing Windows Media
  4. What do I have to do to add Silverlight to my site? For Mac and Windows playback?
    A: Once the beta ships in two weeks, all you'll have to do is drop a little .js and XML into your page and away you go. 
  5. Can additional formats be added for playback?
    A: No, part of the appeal of Silverlight is the small package size- 1MB, includes everything it needs for video and audio, animation, graphics and AJAX-based programmability to boot!
  6. What companies are supporting Silverlight?
    A: Major League Baseball, Brightcove, NetFlix, Frog Design, AvenueA/Razorfish, Akamai, and many others are among the names announced. 
  7. How easy the install really going to be?
    A: How does 3 clicks sound for XP users?  Vista users have one more click by default due to the user account feature.  Web pages can be wired up to do in-line install and auto-refresh after you're done.
  8. Can you really do 720p HD video?  What 3D video card do I need?
    A: Definitely.  About a 3ghz P4 class processor will work, regardless of video card. We've done some really neat processor optimizations. All the demos shown in the booth at NAB were run off a mid-range laptop.
  9. Why does resizing/scaling of apps "snap" differently in Safari/FireFox/IE?
    A: It all depends upon the way the browser renders.  I won't make any qualitative comment as your mileage may vary.
  10. Will Silverlight work with my existing web server?  What about live streaming?
    A: For on-demand, yes! Run it on Darwin, Apache, whatever you're running.  Of course, you'll get a few added benefits with Windows Media streaming- reduced bandwidth costs, faster seeking, etc.
  11. Where can I learn more?
    A: Right now you can learn more at www.microsoft.com/silverlight.  The community site will go live at www.silverlight.net.  The Beta "Cruise" starts on April 30th.  
posted on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 4:28:37 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [2] Trackback
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"Keeping Track Of Silverlight" (Rob Zelt : streams of thought) [Trackback]