Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 12th Feb 2009 08:05 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Novell's Miguel de Icaza has announced on his blog that Moonlight has hit the 1.0 milestone. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology, a framework similar to Adobe's Flash. Silverlight has already been used during the Olympic Games and President Obama's inauguration for streaming those events across the internet.
Permalink for comment 348460
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2007-06-21
Moonlight is a lot more than just a way to play videos on the web.
While Silverlight 1.0 is just a simple canvas for 2D graphics, Silverlight 2.0 introduces a bunch of controls (known as Widgets in the Linux world) for RIA development. Things like TextBoxes, Scrollbars, Comboboxes, Listboxes, etc combined with the ability to write web apps in any language that can compile to IL (of which there are many).
Since Microsoft has already provided the codecs, they can't just take them back - besides, even if they could, Moonlight could just add support for GStreamer (we'd like to do this anyway) and then users would be able to get legal codecs from Fluendo. Or, if you don't live in a country where patents are a problem, you can simply build Moonlight with FFMpeg support (which is already possible w/o any need for patches).
We used the Microsoft codecs that they offered because it was the easiest way for Moonlight users to get free legal video decoders. We couldn't legally ship Moonlight built against FFMpeg.