Items tagged with Silverlight
Years ago, DRM was finally kicked out of the digital music scene. And consumers rejoiced heartily. But DRM is still a major, major factor across the entire spectrum of digital content -- be it UltraViolet for movies, or DRM filters embedded onto Blu-ray Discs, and most things in between. Now, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is responsible for coming together and putting forth Web standards, has published a draft for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). What's that, you ask? It's a structure that'll allow DRM content to be displayed in the browser, without plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight being required. In other words, it's a major step forward. Yes, DRM is still there, but this could...
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There's little doubt that HTML5 is going to have a huge impact on our Web-surfing, as it's far more capable than previous standards to the point where entire plugins can be replaced. Plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and perhaps even the ever-vulnerable Java. While the Web remains rich with Flash-based content, whether it be video, games, or advertisements, Silverlight's implementation is rather minimal. In my personal experience, the only time I've ever needed it was when trying to watch some sports online. For avid movie-viewers, Netflix has no doubt been the leading reason for an install. The folks at Netflix understand this well, and it considers that to be a downside. As stated in...
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Adobe's mobile Flash Player has seemingly passed on this year, and now it looks like Microsoft's own Silverlight may be headed to that weird digital graveyard in the sky, too. Rumors of Silverlight's demise have been floating around for months now, and without a peep from Microsoft themselves, Silverlight 5 has been released. It's a revised plug-in that weighs in at around 7MB in size, with new features including: Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows...
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There's been a fair amount of chatter surrounding Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7, but thus far the software developer has been reluctant to reveal much in the way of details. On Friday, Microsoft's partner group manager for Windows Mobile, Charlie Kindel, announced via blog entry that developers of current or hypothetical future Windows Mobile apps will need to plan to transition to either Silverlight or XNA. Silverlight is Microsoft's Flash competitor (whether or not it actually competes is open to debate); XNA is a standardized set of game authorship tools meant to streamline the programming process and increase developer efficiency. Microsoft doesn't want anyone thinking that it plans...
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Microsoft has developed a rich media platform to compete with Adobe's Flash, called Silverlight. Nokia has decided to sign on to use Silverlight on some of its smartphones and Internet tablets. Microsoft no doubt sees that browsing the Internet and virtual devices will eventually eat into their desktop supremacy, and would like to get a foothold in that on-the-go mediafest now. John Case, a general manager with Microsoft, said Nokia represents the first of several similar announcements for Silverlight on mobile devices. He also said the next generation of Windows Mobile will support Silverlight, though he declined to give a time frame for the release of Windows Mobile 7. In...
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Microsoft is very late to the party with Silverlight, its cross-browser cross-platform plug-in for rich media on the web. Adobe's Flash is so far ahead delivering stuff to look at that it seemed Microsoft would have no chance to catch up. But what if it was better? A lot better? This sounds better: A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia - particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part...
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