Silverlight 3 beta with H.264 support available

[benwaggoner]

I mentioned this a while ago, but we've actually got a beta out today.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Silverlight-3-Beta-Whatrsquos-New-for-Media/

Specifically, Silverlight's MPEG-4/H.264/AAC-LC support includes:

Self-contained .mp4 (including .f4v and .m4a) and .mov file formats (no reference movies or anything fancy like that).
H.264 video in Simple, Main, and High 4:2:0 profiles (progressive scan only)
AAC-LC audio mono or stereo (HE AAC will play back with lower fidelity, as in QuickTime)
Local files or http progressive download.

So, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash.

The H.264 and AAC-LC decoders are exposed via the MediaStreamSource used by Smooth Streaming, which means extending support to other file formats and protocols will work there as well. And of course, Smooth Streaming will support H.264 and AAC-LC as well.


This is still beta, so we're welcoming any feedback on issues, problematic content, etcetera. Anything in Simple/Main/High 4:2:0 should work, so if you find anything that doesn't, let us know (ideally with some sample content).

And, sorry Dark Shikari, we didn't get lossless in there :). Your request led to some real discussion about it, but in the end we just couldn't reallocate enough media test resources away from other features to sufficiently validate it. We can definitely revisit that if we see lossless H.264 catching on, or otherwise see some enabling scenarios around it.

Anyway, give it a spin and tell us what you think.

[Dark Shikari]

So, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash.I thought Flash could play interlaced (MBAFF/PAFF)? Despite my dislike for non-progressive content, I would think those would be considerably more important than lossless...

[benwaggoner]

I thought Flash could play interlaced (MBAFF/PAFF)?
It can, although it doesn't have any deinterlacing support in its pipeline so I'm not sure how useful it is :).

What I was trying to say that a file that plays well in Flash AND QuickTime would also play well in Silverlight 3, and QuickTime doesn't do interlaced H.264. There's plenty of stuff that one of them can do that neither the other nor Silverlight can.

That said, we certainly welcome feature requests for how to expand this support in future versions to enable additional scenarios.

Interlacing was something we thought would be more expensive than useful, since it's slower to decode intrinsically, would require a deinterlacing pipeline be built as well, and would increase the size of the installer.

[Dark Shikari]

It can, although it doesn't have any deinterlacing support in its pipeline so I'm not sure how useful it is :).That makes me wonder as well what the hell was the point of having it in there to begin with...

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Why should anybody embed an interlaced video into a web-site, just to deinterlace it on the client side?

Doesn't it make much more sense to deinterlace before encoding (using a high-quality deinterlacer) and only embed progressive videos into web-sites?

Embedding interlaced video into web-sites just doesn't make any sense to me. Not like interlaced video does make much sense at all...

[Sagekilla]

I should hope most media sites (or at least the smart ones) deinterlace any interlaced video that gets thrown at them. IIRC, interlaced tends to suck up more bitrate than progressive does.

[benwaggoner]

That makes me wonder as well what the hell was the point of having it in there to begin with...
In Flash? No idea. I've certainly never seen it being used, and can't really think of why it would be useful for a browser plugin.

A good motion-adaptive bob deinterlacer can make interlaced encoding with interlaced source more efficient; we saw about a 30% bitrate advantage in encoding 30i as 30i compared to encoding 30i as 60p with VC-1. But the decode complexity is high enough it wouldn't really make that much sense to do in a software-only player. And most player architectures aren't really set up to do this very efficiently. Deinterlacing in the decoder when you have the motion vector and block type data available would be a lot easier than later in the pipeline when you've got just YUY2 frames. But most architectures really force the latter approach.

I fantasized about doing that for Silveright, but the dev/test cost was way too high relative to the benefit; there's a lot lower hanging fruit out there.

[turbojet]

Will this finally allow people to view flash in 64 bit windows browsers?

Adobe has been 'working' on this for over a year now, still only 32 bit windows releases.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Will this finally allow people to view flash in 64 bit windows browsers?

Nope. Sliverlight is not related to Flash at all. It's an adversarial technology!

The Silverlight plugin does only work with Silverlight animations (not with Flash animations). The Flash plugin does only work with Flash animations (not with Silverlight animations).

Hence Silverlight cannot substitute Flash (or vice versa). It's two different products by two different companies that exist in parallel.

Anyway, why not use a 32-Bit browser on 64-Bit Windows ???

[benwaggoner]

Will this finally allow people to view flash in 64 bit windows browsers?

Adobe has been 'working' on this for over a year now, still only 32 bit windows releases.
Silverlight 3 remains 32-bit only, although the Moonlight implementation from Novell is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux.

I suppose it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing; since almost no one is using native 64-bit browsers, it didn't seem worth the test cost to add another ISA. 64-bit is pretty trival from a code perspective, but it's a big expansion in the number of platforms we'd need to test on.

So, for my own context, can you tell me why and how you'd use a 64-bit browser instead of a 32-bit browser?

[turbojet]

Oh ok, I know I've ran across some streams that say install: adobe flash player or silverlight to play this content. Which I'm guessing is the same stream but I could be wrong and I thought what ben said 'So, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash.' would mean it could be a replacement for flash.

64 bit browsers render much quicker then 32 bit ones and I notice it quite a bit.

In terms of speed of what I use (slowest to fastest): IE7 32 - Firefox - IE7 64 - Minefield (64 bit firefox)

Minefield is my default but I use Firefox when I want to use flash. The same plugins work for both.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Oh ok, I know I've ran across some streams that say install: adobe flash player or silverlight to play this content. Which I'm guessing is the same stream but I could be wrong and I thought what ben said 'So, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash.' would mean it could be a replacement for flash.

It's quite possible that some web-sites provide the same contents for both, Flash and Silverlight.

But this isn't automatic...

[Gabriel_Bouvigne]

AAC-LC audio mono or stereo (HE AAC will play back with lower fidelity, as in QuickTime)
No HE-AACv2? Is it something settled on, or is it just because it is still in beta stage and not feature complete?
(btw, we now have strong hints that quicktime will support HE-AAC very soon)

[deets]

So, for my own context, can you tell me why and how you'd use a 64-bit browser instead of a 32-bit browser?

i only have 64 minefield on one computer, well as well as ie 32/64. i personally get peeved at having to switch browsers just to use a function like flash.

for those of us who specifically went 64 bit os, why on earth wouldnt we want to use the 64 bit versions of all software, its why we got the darn thing :D

[burfadel]

Because despite what people say - and I'm sure I'm just about to open the can of worms - 32 bit applications peform better on x64 64-bit Windows. Much of this can probably be put down to 64 bit drivers :)...

[turbojet]

Because despite what people say - and I'm sure I'm just about to open the can of worms - 32 bit applications peform better on x64 64-bit Windows. Much of this can probably be put down to 64 bit drivers ...

I think this only applies to applications that have more optimized 32 bit code (it's more mature after all) then 64 bit code. However for most apps you probably wouldn't notice a difference between 32 and 64 bit cause it can't really make use of the 64 bit registries anyhow, a web browser just happens to be something that can benefit. Apps that are optimized just as well or better for 64 bit usually run a little faster on 64 bit, x264 and ffdshow64 are 2 popular tools discussed here that show this.

As for software developers compiling 64 bit apps I think it's mostly because they don't have the time or don't want to maintain 2 branches. Eventually 64 bit will be the norm but it's probably still at least 5 years out. I read many places (rumor?) that Microsoft announced Windows 7 was going to be 64 bit only but 32 bit exists and now I see reported that Windows 7 is the last 32 bit windows OS.

Just my thoughts on it but this is a bit off topic for this thread so this is all I'll discuss about 32 vs 64 bit.

[benwaggoner]

No HE-AACv2? Is it something settled on, or is it just because it is still in beta stage and not feature complete?
AAC-LC is the plan. Licensing of it for something like Silverlight that's a platform to build other apps on can be complex, and we hadn't had requests for it from many customers yet. Feel free to pitch me on what kind of content you'd got that uses it.

That said, we have tested we can play back the base stream of HE AAC, so you'll get audio, just at half sample rate. Not idea for anything other than voice, of course.

This is something that we'd love to see addressed via our Raw AV support for managed decoders, as we're discussing over on this thread:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=145758

(btw, we now have strong hints that quicktime will support HE-AAC very soon)
Do you have a link? I hadn't heard that.

[Gabriel_Bouvigne]

AAC-LC is the plan. Licensing of it for something like Silverlight that's a platform to build other apps on can be complex, and we hadn't had requests for it from many customers yet. Feel free to pitch me on what kind of content you'd got that uses it.
I was suspecting a licensing issue.
Regarding content, any 3gp content would likely use either HE-AAC or HE-AACv2. Sure, they are low-res contents, but it would sometimes be convenient to be able to serve the same assets for different platforms (and having an audio decoder handling the full frequency range).
As Flash supports HE-AACv2, there are some websites pushing HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 content. Examples: BBC IPlayer, Joost


Do you have a link? I hadn't heard that.
I don't have a direct link, as developers docs at Apple are requiring prior registration/login. However, within the "iPhone Streaming Media Guide for Web Developers" released on March 15th, it is clearly mentioned that iPhone 3.0 will support HE-AAC. To me it is then quite likely that Apple will push a QuickTime update on the same day as iPhone 3.0 will be released, bringing HE-AAC support.

[Shinigami-Sama]

So, for my own context, can you tell me why and how you'd use a 64-bit browser instead of a 32-bit browser?

64bit OS 64bit apps... makes sense to me

[LoRd_MuldeR]

64bit OS 64bit apps... makes sense to me

Makes sense only if the particular applications benefits from 64-Bit, as 32-Bit apps run just fine on 64-Bit OS and usually have better support...

[turbojet]

Which web browsing does benefit quite a bit from. What I don't understand from Microsoft is that Vista 64 bit dominates 32 bit in sales (and reports say they expect Windows 7 64 to dominate 32 even more) and they have IE7 64 and 32 installed by default but they are only supporting IE 32 with silverlight which is a very common web browser support tool.

While Microsoft still has to rely on adobe (real and quicktime have had IE 64 plugins for some time) for 64 bit IE support. if they had adobe support and chose to set IE64 as default on windows 7 64 they could stop some of the firefox bleeding, at least the user's that use firefox mainly because its faster then IE 32 which it clearly is but it's not as fast as IE 64. Minefield is hardly noticeably faster then IE 64 but I prefer the gui and the well supported plugin system from mozilla.

It's like on one hand Microsoft is trying to push forward with 64 bit (rightfully so) while on the other hand they are trying to work against it.

I was really expecting Silverlight 3 to have 32 and 64 bit support, I'm really bummed it doesn't appear to and I'm sure I'm not alone.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Well, having a 64-Bit OS has a number of advantages. You can utilize 4+ GB of RAM and you are prepared for upcoming 64-Bit applications.

Still this doesn't mean that you must use only 64-Bit applications on a 64-Bit OS. Few applications are available for 64-Bit Windows yet (although the number is increasing), 32-Bit applications work fine.

So I can understand that M$ and Adobe decided that it's not worth supporting a 64-Bit browser at this time. Chrome and Firefox show us that 32-Bit browsers can be really fast!

Anyway, I wonder why M$ pushed out 64-Bit InternetExplorer at all. If they are not going to fully support 64-Bit InternetExplorer, they consequently should never have released it - at this time.

(Note: Even 64-Bit InternetExplorer feels so MUCH slower then 32-Bit Firefox/Chrome that the room for improvements definitely is somewhere else...)

[turbojet]

Adobe has 64 bit linux support for quite some time and 'working' on 64 bit windows support, which is supposed to come in flash 10.

True 64 bit OS's doesn't mean you have to use 64 bit apps, but in this case it's saying I have to use 32 bit even though it's inferior.

Firefox and Chrome are very fast, but slow in comparison to IE7 64, Minefield.

The only company that we are discussing that shows lack of interest in 64 bit in this discussion is Microsoft, specifically with Silverlight.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Adobe has 64 bit linux support for quite some time and 'working' on 64 bit windows support, which is supposed to come in flash 10.

At least 64-Bit Windows support obviously isn't a priority for them. 64-Bit Flash Player is in the 'we are working on it' state for quite some time now...

Firefox and Chrome are very fast, but slow in comparison to IE7 64, Minefield.

I can't agree. InternetExplorer 7.0/8.0 (even the 64-Bit versions) feels horribly slow, no matter how many benchmarks pretending the opposite they publish.
Not only that it takes absurdly long to open a new tab, it also takes far to much time to load a web-site. Often the entire browser seems to freeze for a few seconds!
Hence the 32-Bit versions of Firefox/SeaMonkey as well as Chrome just feel a whole lot faster to me.
I also tested 64-Bit Minefield against 32-Bit Firefox, but I can't notice any significant difference, as the latter already feels perfectly smooth.

But that's getting a bit off-topic now, I think ;)

[Shinigami-Sama]

Makes sense only if the particular applications benefits from 64-Bit, as 32-Bit apps run just fine on 64-Bit OS and usually have better support...

thats the same half assery as 16bit programs in 32bit OSes...

[benwaggoner]

thats the same half assery as 16bit programs in 32bit OSes...
Not really. 32-bit was a HUGE improvement in security, stability, and development from 16-bit. 32-bit was really a whole new and much better beast for writing and running software. 64-bit is a relatively minor improvement on top of 32-bit, the value of which is dependent on the application.

For software that needs huge memory like a database, it's an obvious win. Ther's a reason that the current Exchange is 64-bit only. Windows Media Services is also quite a bit faster in 64-bit mode.

But other stuff, it simply does't address any actual bottlenecks in the code. There's no end-user difference in browsing experience due to being in 64-bit; you're never going to need 4+ GB browsing today's web, and the extra registers simply aren't that material.

From my own field, we never found a way to do anything all that compelling with 64-bit for video compression; SSEx and memory architecture are massively more important. While we dabbled with a 64-bit version of WME, we discoverd that most of the performance improvements there were applicable to 32-bit as well. In the end, we could provide better net performance by focusing on 32-bit instead of having to split dev/test across two different ISA's. The focus on making 32-bit faster made encoding on 64-bit faster than if we'd spent half as much effort focused on just 64-bit.

[turbojet]

I guess it all depends on the code. x264 gets a nice 5-15% speed boost in most cases just from a 64 bit exe. Using 64 bit avisynth/splitter/decoder is expected to give more of a boost.

I did some benchmarks with peacekeeper (http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action) on an X2 3800+ 1GB RAM vista 64 box and this was the results:
Firefox 3.0.7: 300
Minefield 3.0.7: 307
IE7 32: 164
IE7 64: 199

There's definitely some differences but I'm not sure how accurate the benchmark is.

My only gripe with Microsoft is that they aren't supporting their own 64 bit web browser by keeping Silverlight 32 bit only yet they expect 64 bit windows to keep dominating 32 bit in sales.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I guess it all depends on the code. x264 gets a nice 5-15% speed boost in most cases just from a 64 bit exe.

Because x264 is highly CPU limited, is optimized for x64 and doesn't have any GUI. That's not exactly comparable to a web-browser ;)

There's definitely some differences but I'm not sure how accurate the benchmark is.

Not very accurate. If the benchmark would represent how "fast" and "responsive" a browser feels in real-life usage, the numbers would look more like this:

Firefox: 100
Minefield: 105
IE7 32: 10
IE7 64: 11

[Snowknight26]

Someone's biased. ;)

[Dark Shikari]

Someone's biased. ;)Yeah, giving IE scores that high is absurd.

[turbojet]

Because x264 is highly CPU limited, is optimized for x64 and doesn't have any GUI. That's not exactly comparable to a web-browser ;)


Uh that was in response to ben's claim that focusing on 32 bit encoding is more beneficial then spending half the time focusing on 64 bit. Which I can't disagree with when it comes to WME but depending on the code it's not always true.

Web browsing mainly involves many reads/writes of small files, like decoding or antivirus. Both of which have proven benefits from optimized 64 bit code as opposed to optimized 32 bit code on a 64 bit OS.

Anyhow it's pretty clear that silverlight 3 won't be released in 64 bit from what I understand, guess I will have to wait even longer to get rid of firefox. Maybe when Flash 64 bit drops they'll consider it.

[benwaggoner]

I guess it all depends on the code. x264 gets a nice 5-15% speed boost in most cases just from a 64 bit exe. Using 64 bit avisynth/splitter/decoder is expected to give more of a boost.
It'd be interesting to see that end to end test, and to do some profiling to see where the speed gains really come from.

Like I said, when we did WME x64 edition, it was a whole lot faster than the 32-bit version. But once we looked at the optimizations that were done, there was very little that was 64-bit specific in that.

Often doing a 64-bit port is a great excuse to do some performance improving refactoring, so just because a 64-bit verisons is faster doesn't mean that it's faster due solely to 64-bit features.

[QUOTE]My only gripe with Microsoft is that they aren't supporting their own 64 bit web browser by keeping Silverlight 32 bit only yet they expect 64 bit windows to keep dominating 32 bit in sales.
It's always down to delivering the best customer value per release given dev/test costs. Having to test on a whole additional set of browsers and develop for another ISA would have meant fewer other new features. I'm sure we'll do a 64-bit verison down the road, but there were other higher priority features to deliver in SL3.

Since .NET bytcode itself is bitness-agnostic, Silverlight apps for 64-bit wouldn't be any different, so if we reach a point where 64-bit browsing has a significant advantage over 32-bit, a Silverlight 64-bit version would take the existing base of applicaitons along with it for free.

But really, the places where we sweat performance in Silverlight aren't things that that 64-bitness would help. Conversely, SSE2 is a HUGE win all kinds of places in Silverlight.

Those with a more recent CompSci background than mine would have more useful thoughts on this, but it seems that SIMD-heavy code isn't going to get as much value out of 64-bit native as branchy scalar code, where those extra registers are a big help. And even with 2K encoding with 16 reference frames, it's hard to see an instance of an encoder getting anywhere near 4GB of memory utilization. The encoders I see using even 2 GB of RAM running are generally running multiple encoder instances for parallelization, but no one process is using even 1 GB of RAM.

[CruNcher]

How does the GPU acceleration is working now (what is done to make it secure) ? is DXVA 1.0 still supported XP or only 2.0 (Vista/Seven) is it browser dependent ?
Is Smooth Stream already implemented for H.264 in the Windows Media Server ? is it supported in MediaRoom ?
Performance compared to Adobes Mainconcept Decoder in FlashPlayer (Software Decoding) Multithreaded ?
when is the SL OpenVideoPlayer code gonna be updated with the 3.0 tree ?

http://showcase.premiere.de/PremiereShowcase.htm <- hope we gonna see some similar Showcase based on H.264 and SL3 :)

[nm]

How does the GPU acceleration is working now (what is done to make it secure) ? is DXVA 1.0 still supported XP or only 2.0 (Vista/Seven) is it browser dependent ?
Silverlight 3 does not use DXVA. It only supports GPU scaling and compositing, like Flash 10.
Read "GPU scaling and compositing" at http://blogs.iis.net/benwagg/archive/2009/03/18/silverlight-3-beta-what-s-new-for-media.aspx

[Manao]

Like I said, when we did WME x64 edition, it was a whole lot faster than the 32-bit version. But once we looked at the optimizations that were done, there was very little that was 64-bit specific in that.It's also the case for x264. Only a handful of SIMD functions make use of more than 8 SIMD registers. So most of the roughly 10% boost is brought simply by compiling for 64 bits (more registers, faster calling convention). Imho, the only scenario in which x64 wouldn't help that much is when a piece of code is memory bound.

Finally, since x264 is both open source and already insanely optimized for 32bits, it's a good project to test what speed ups x64 can manage. As you said, if a closed source application gains 50% speed up in x64, we can't conclude anything since the whole application may have been rewritten while being converted to x64.

[CruNcher]

Thx for the link i just read this "GPU acceleration and H.264 video support;" and thought it means DXVA, but i guess it's a to heavy security problem implementing it in a Webbrowser Plugin :(

[squid_80]

From my own field, we never found a way to do anything all that compelling with 64-bit for video compression; SSEx and memory architecture are massively more important.
Maybe if the win64 ABI was more sensible (XMM6+XMM7 are now non-volatile, WTF?) you would have had different findings. </rant>

[benwaggoner]

Silverlight 3 does not use DXVA. It only supports GPU scaling and compositing, like Flash 10.
Read "GPU scaling and compositing" at http://blogs.iis.net/benwagg/archive/2009/03/18/silverlight-3-beta-what-s-new-for-media.aspx
Exactly. Getting DXVA working well cross-platform for VC-1 and H.264 would be...challenging to say the least. And it's generally the older machines that don't have GPU decode where you'd most want it anyway.

A much broader swath of the installed base can handle GPU scaling and compositing, which winds up helping media playback anyway as it saves CPU and memory bandwidth the decoders can now have.

We're trying to be really crisp in communicating it as "GPU compositing and scaling" - Adobe's Flash 10 marketing left a lot of people thinking that they were doing actual decoder acceleration on the GPU, and we don't want to confuse the market in the same way.

We're also trying to hold the line on HD as being at least 1280 pixels wide; zambelli and I are fighting hard against this "480p is HD for the web!" nonsense . Hence the March Madness player is being labled as "HQ" not "HD."

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/March-Madness-Silverlight-on-YouTube-and-encoding-settings/

[popper]

Ben you might be better to shift the HQ +Wide Screen to better fit peoples expectations today.

if your really looking for a must have option for the future SilverLight3 , write and include as a generic option,making sure to turn it on from first install (with an easy GUI/shell option to turn it off OC), what?
a "Multicast tunnel client/server" make it as simple or complex a model as you like, that any (AVC)video content can then use as its generic WWW streaming path.

but this generic Multicast tunnel MUST be included and documented for easy interfacing from any 3rd party code, and a browser plugin that knows about and uses this tunnel and any "SAP ANNOUNCE" data found as default.

http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/03/19/live-ncaa-basketball-everywhere/
"....CBS has embedded its Silverlight March Madness and live game coverage directly onto a YouTube channel...."

"...Microsoft’s Silverlight powers the channel. It is the first time YouTube has ever been able to offer live TV. In addition to the Flash-based ~550Kbps standard def streaming, the optional Silverlight player will deliver “high-definition quality video” running at ~1.5Mbps to millions, at home or on the go. At MIX09, this week in Las Vegas, Microsoft was showcasing Silverlight technologies. ...."

give people the choice and make it easy for them to migrate from the old antiquated Unicast streaming to a real multicast bandwidth saver and you might see the web become far more usable for multicast tunneled user created content with SL3 at the core....

having the ability to live Multicast (through a tunnel) your content to just 3+ people interested in it, gaves you a saving in both bandwidth and processing long term,never mind the likes of massive savings Youtube streaming sites might make, so make multicasting tunnels easy to use and a generic option for everyone....

VLC and the like might then finally include some form of Multicast tunnel in their core code too compliment their existing generic Multicast Transport Stream abilitys, and so make it easy to bypass the worlds major and minor ISPs that refuse to give direct access to the MultiCast protocol to/from their end users ;)


video stream<>SL3-server<>multicast-tunnel<> any client/plugin listening/asking for the content

[benwaggoner]

Ben you might be better to shift the HQ +Wide Screen to better fit peoples expectations today.
Yeah, I like the "HQ" moniker, since it reminds the not very technical of HD, without being misleading to those who know the proper definition.

Also, with Smooth Streaming, we're working to make HD delivery a lot more feasible, so we'll be able to accurately call a player HD.

if your really looking for a must have option for the future SilverLight3 , write and include as a generic option,making sure to turn it on from first install (with an easy GUI/shell option to turn it off OC), what?
a "Multicast tunnel client/server" make it as simple or complex a model as you like, that any (AVC)video content can then use as its generic WWW streaming path.

but this generic Multicast tunnel MUST be included and documented for easy infacing from any 3rd party code, and a browser plugin that knows about and uses this tunnel as default.
In the end, Silverlight really is an application framework, so we've stayed away from any cases where it would ever be implicitly triggered. Silverlight doesn't get any file type associations, so the only time it ever gets used is when it's explicitly called. The Moonlight guys have done something kind of like this with Moonshine. With the new out-of-the-browser mode, having Silverlight work more like a desktop player is a little more feasible, but for security reasons it'll never have unfettered access to the local file system. Something like Moonshine could certainly incldue a native code multicast proxy and then call Moonlight/Silverlight, serving the media as a localhost web service.

As for multicast, I think the proxy chaching of Smooth Streaming provides a lot of the value without nearly the same infrastructure overhead. Multicast is mostly of interest for enterprise (where there aren't internal proxy caches) and low latency (where a chunk-based approach gives a multi-second broadcast delay).

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Beta-Release-of-Smooth-Streaming/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Live-Smooth-Streaming-Beta-Inlet-encoderrsquos-and-the-2010-Winter-Olympics/

give people the choice and make it easy for them to migrate from the old antiquated Unicast streaming to a real multicast bandwidth saver and you might see the web become far more usable for multicast tunneled user created content with SL3 at the core...
The problem with multicast is that very few users in the USA actually have end-to-end multicast enabled routers to them from the public internet. We've supported multicast in Windows Media for years, and it's virtually unused for consumer media except in the few countries where they had a goverment mandate for multicast support.

[popper]

Yeah, I like the "HQ" moniker, since it reminds the not very technical of HD, without being misleading to those who know the proper definition.

sorry, perhaps i wasnt clear enough, i was refering to the requirement for, and expectation of "WS/WideScreen" by everyone today, so make sure you include that most basic 16:9.

remember the basic choices to keep (HD) widescreen ratios when you get the choice to Encode your content are 848x480 (16:9) ,1280x720 (16:9) , 1360x768 (16:9) , and OC 1920x1080 (16:9), were the likes of the UKs Virgin media users on 10/20/50Mbit could use that real HD ;)

Also, with Smooth Streaming, we're working to make HD delivery a lot more feasible, so we'll be able to accurately call a player HD.

thats the worlds ISPs problem though, making sure they supply real unlimited high bitrates that you can stream AVC/H.264 HQ/HD WideScreen to and from the web and turning their Multicast filtering OFF all the way to/from the end users CPE kit sat on the desk OC.


In the end, Silverlight really is an application framework, so we've stayed away from any cases where it would ever be implicitly triggered.

Silverlight doesn't get any file type associations, so the only time it ever gets used is when it's explicitly called.

The Moonlight guys have done something kind of like this with Moonshine.

With the new out-of-the-browser mode, having Silverlight work more like a desktop player is a little more feasible, but for security reasons it'll never have unfettered access to the local file system.

Something like Moonshine could certainly include a native code multicast proxy and then call Moonlight/Silverlight, serving the media as a localhost web service.

but a "multicast proxy" does a totally different job to my proposed "multicast tunnel" , and im clearly talking about allowing for Multicast streaming user to users and server to users over the web, rather than the local LAN/WAN/MAN were your ISP cant interfer with your protocols.

As for multicast, I think the proxy caching of Smooth Streaming provides a lot of the value without nearly the same infrastructure overhead.
perhaps so ,but im not convinced yet,time will tell i guess.

Multicast is mostly of interest for enterprise (where there aren't internal proxy caches) and low latency (where a chunk-based approach gives a multi-second broadcast delay).

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Beta-Release-of-Smooth-Streaming/
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Live-Smooth-Streaming-Beta-Inlet-encoderrsquos-and-the-2010-Winter-Olympics/



NO, thats not true, IF you or some other 3rd party were to give the end users the ability to simply use multicast inside a generic included tunnel if need be, to easly stream and control/announce their content, then they would, like a shot.... it is NOT just of interest for enterprises, end users that know about it,have wanted it forever , and those that dont, would soon see the benefits as it became popular....and saves them long term bandwidth and CPU processing.

The problem with multicast is that very few users in the USA actually have end-to-end multicast enabled routers to them from the public internet. We've supported multicast in Windows Media for years, and it's virtually unused for consumer media except in the few countries where they had a goverment mandate for multicast support.

the world is not just the USA remember Ben ;)

Multicast is "Virtually Unused" not because people dont want to use it, but Because the ISPS go out of their way to filter the Multicast protocol and/or turn it OFF altogether in their routers and related kit.

and i take the implyed point about the home router problem, However i did say and keep saying "Tunnel"

exactly because of this ISP filtering of the protocol, as all the worlds ISP routers and related kit are fully multicast capable, but they choose not to let you the end users use or access it..

because the majority of the world ISPS filter it from you for no good reason, you NEED a tunnel and a multicast end point (this Multicast server/tunnel i advocate inside SL for instance) to bypass that and mTunnel proves the point, try it between two or more web connected PCs and VLC MC some content from one, works fine and the ISPs choices to deprive you of the MC protocol are no more.
http://www.cdt.luth.se/~peppar/progs/mTunnel/

this most basic and old java based multicast tunnel runs on any generic UDP IPV4, and you then place/push any of your multicast content inside that tunnel, SO no problem as you have bypassed their native UDP IPV4/6 multicast filtering etc....

you must be able to make something that can perform at least as good as the old "Mtunnel" from MBONE days surely?, and intigrate it into SL as a generic option for people/devs to use!, the question then is, "will you? include a tunnel that works for easy use of multicast content streaming and it's control over the web"

Ohh ,and stop calling AVC/H.264 "Mpeg-4" in your blog ;) , people might start thinking you can use Divx the original "Mpeg4" in SL

[popper]

ben said:"Quote: In the end, Silverlight really is an application framework, ..."

just a thought, are we going to see SilverLight being used for serving the 360 for video streaming over multicast ?, and are we ever going to see a firmware update for the 360 that can play AAC-LC with more than 2 channels from that ?

come to that, could you put SL and some way to control/interact with it on the 360 firmware given its PPC/Altivec+ based, does your SL codebase compile and run there ?

[benwaggoner]

Ohh ,and stop calling AVC/H.264 "Mpeg-4" in your blog ;) , people might start thinking you can use Divx the original "Mpeg4" in SL
I don't think I ever call the codec MPEG-4 in the blog, but I do specify the MPEG-4 file format in a bunch of places.

Our terminology could use some refactoring. I'm particulary tired of typing and explaining "MPEG-4 Part 2" over and over again :).

[benwaggoner]

just a thought, are we going to see SilverLight being used for serving the 360 for video streaming over multicast?
You mean going from Silverlight to the XBox 360 as an extender?

That's really out of scope for Silverlight, since it'd be just serving a file without any of the interactivity and managed code. WMP works fine for that already.

and are we ever going to see a firmware update for the 360 that can play AAC-LC with more than 2 channels from that ?
That would be a question for the Xbox team. I know they know that some people want it :). I don't recall why it wasn't done the first time around, so I don't know if anything has changed to enable it.

come to that, could you put SL and some way to control/interact with it on the 360 firmware given its PPC/Altivec+ based, does your SL codebase compile and run there ?
Silverlight for an integrated device like the Xbox would really be a reimplementation more than a recompilation to be done well. Try YouTube on the PS3 if you want to see how well a recompilation approach works :). The nice thing about a device like a phone or console is that you can count on hardware and drivers MUCH better than with a PC, so stuff like the GPU can be leveraged more. In a lot of ways, console and CE devices are more like smartphones with huge screens than a desktop computer.

[popper]

lol, just call it AVC and be done with it, everyone can then follow your lead....

"sliced another way, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash." kind of implys the codec to the average user dont you think....

"sliced another way, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all AVC files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash." sounds just so much nicer to the average users, at least i think so.

"You mean going from Silverlight to the XBox 360 as an extender?"
yes...

but more than that, id like to see the interactivity potential of SL directly on the 360,the codecs updated to bring it inline with todays content, hell even a simple browser would be a good start in the next firmware update so we could use it for web based Silverlight and other content online/LAN etc...

i dont see it as a fixed CE device , it is a powerful 3 core PPC/Altivec PC that could be doing so much more in the video streaming home, but for the lack of (SL)apps or the ability to install them and use remotely from your LAN....

as an extender 360/WMP doesnt go anywere far enough for me, so i use Tversity as the better option right now, the path for SL doesnt seem very clear to me as you imply these type of apps are "really out of scope for Silverlight", if so it seems the 360 will never be anything other than a dumb extender relying on a powered LAN PC were it could be so much more independant in the streaming video home, or perhaps that might change in the future with a firmware update!

[Dark Shikari]

H.264 is probably a better term than AVC, as it's more widely used IMO.

[benwaggoner]

lol, just call it AVC and be done with it, everyone can then follow your lead....

"sliced another way, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash." kind of implys the codec to the average user dont you think....

"sliced another way, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all AVC files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash." sounds just so much nicer to the average users, at least i think so.
But it's not an AVC file. It's a MPEG-4 file containing H.264 and AAC-LC content. H.264 is a codec, not a container. I think that, when being precise, I'd only call it a "H.264 file" if it's an elementary stream file.

"You mean going from Silverlight to the XBox 360 as an extender?"
yes...
What would you get from that you couldn't get from WMP?

[benwaggoner]

H.264 is probably a better term than AVC, as it's more widely used IMO.
A few years back I tried to push AVC over H.264, as both easer to type and say, and also to be neutral between MPEG and ITU. And yes, there are still people who care about the politics of the name - kind of like the GNU/Linux thing. So I make sure to call it AVC/H.264 when it might be read by those audiences :). A few years about I had a whole PowerPoint slide explaining the codec's nomenclature.

But in general, H.264 clearly won the naming war, probably thanks to Apple and QuickTime. H.264 is certainly better than typing "MPEG-4 Part 10" every time... I just wish we had a H.26x name for MPEG-4 Part 2, since there's really not satisfying shorthand for it. divx/xvid are product specific, and ASP is obviously specific to a particular profile.

[hajj_3]

Its a shame you arent making a 64bit version of silverlight3, vista64 has a 64bit version of IE7 (not default of course) and i'm fairly sure IE8 on windows7 x64 is 64bit, dont think i saw a 32bit version on the start menu of beta 7057 i tried a few days ago. Seems a bit pointless having a 64bit IE and no 64bit flash or silverlight. Can't you just hire some more programmers, you're making alot of profit each year.

Will multi-channel AAC be supported?

DXVA would be nice to add in the next version, just to reduce the cpu usage a little, especially on laptops with say a nvidia 8 series card, many of which only have a pentium dual core, maybe even celeron-m cpu. Wont affect those with core i7 cpu's much but for older cpu's it would help.

Maybe version 3.5 you could add 64bit support, HE-AAC, DXVA and maybe a few other missing things. I havent come across many websites that use silverlight that i use, only ITV.com/catchup (online tv catchup service for a uk tv channel), do you have a list of big sites that use it somewhere?

[benwaggoner]

Its a shame you arent making a 64bit version of silverlight3, vista64 has a 64bit version of IE7 (not default of course) and i'm fairly sure IE8 on windows7 x64 is 64bit, dont think i saw a 32bit version on the start menu of beta 7057 i tried a few days ago. Seems a bit pointless have a 64bit IE and no 64bit flash or silverlight. Can't you just hire some more programmers, you're making alot of profit each year.
Win 7 definitely supports 32-bit browsing in 64-bit mode, or else plugins wouldn't work :). They may have cleaned up GUI around that to avoid this very confusion.

64-bit seems compelling as nerd correctness, but really is much more interesting at the OS level than at the consumer app level for most things. It's big for databases, Photoshop, and 3D animation where > 4 GB can actually get used.

Will multi-channel AAC be supported?
Not in Silverlight 3. Our audio pipeline is stereo only, like Flash, so there really hasn't been that much point yet.

DXVA would be nice to add in the next version, just to reduce the cpu usage a little, especially on laptops with say a nvidia 8 series card, many of which only have a pentium dual core, maybe even celeron-m cpu. Wont affect those with core i7 cpu's much but for older cpu's it would help.
The challenge is that Silverlight can do a whole lot of post-decode processing of the video, far beyond what WMP could do, and DXVA isn't really well suited to doing rich post-decode image processing. And DXVA isn't always reliable to use by default on the morass of cards and drivers out there; if DXVA driver bugs failed on even 2% of customer desktops out there as currently configured, we'd have a support nightmare.

Maybe version 3.5 you could add 64bit support, HE-AAC, DXVA and maybe a few other missing things. I havent come across many websites that use silverlight that i use, only ITV.com/catchup (online tv catchup service for a uk tv channel), do you have a list of big sites that use it somewhere?
We really need to get the "where Silverlight is used" site up. Unfortuantely many of the most compelling examples are georestricted, so there's really only visible in one region. The one most people talk about is Netflix, I'd guess. The March Madness tourneyment here in the states is massive, and in Silverlight, as is most of CBS Sports now. Home Shopping Network (also huge in the USA) has been all Silverlight for over a year now. We just announced we're doing the 2010 winter Olympics, including like streaming of whole events in 720p. All the major South Korean broadcasters have standardized on Silverlight. TV2 in Norway. RAI in Italy. CTV in Canada. BSkyB.

If you can tell me what country you live in, I can find out what our cool stuff there is.

[hajj_3]

im from UK, only site i've encountered is ITV.com/catchup (catchup tv service). Having a page on your microsoft.com/silverlight showing what sites use it and for what purpose might help silverlight catch on a bit more so people can see it in action as at the moment its in windows update and most people dont know what its used for and probably have never encountered a silverlight site.

[benwaggoner]

im from UK, only site i've encountered is ITV.com/catchup (catchup tv service). Having a page on your microsoft.com/silverlight showing what sites use it and for what purpose might help silverlight catch on a bit more so people can see it in action as at the moment its in windows update and most people dont know what its used for and probably have never encountered a silverlight site.
In the UK, both BSkyB and MSN.UK are using Silverlight heavily.

[IgorC]

HE-AAC is still relevant even for desktop PCs (don't talk about mobile and Wi fi narrow bandwith). There are still a lot of connections like ADSL 512 kbits and Cable 640 kbits. Bitrate of audio track is something around of 10% of total bitrate (audio+video). Even if those connections will go to 1 Mbps in 2010 it will still appropriate use of HE-AAC as total bitrate will be around 700-850 kbit/s (700-800 kbits video + 64-80 kbits HE-AAC). Probably during 2012 it will be possible to get rid of HE-AAC as the slowest connection for desktop segment will be ~2 Mbps.

[Astrophizz]

I don't know about 2 Mbps by 2012, a lot of people (at least in the US) still use dial-up because of how exorbitant internet prices are.

[mozzle]

I assume you have researched availability/pricing of cable(HIGH-SPEED) in your locale. Just as a matter of of interest, how much does does your dial-up cost compared to high-speed? Just interested.

Best of luck.

M




I don't know about 2 Mbps by 2012, a lot of people (at least in the US) still use dial-up because of how exorbitant internet prices are.

[Shinigami-Sama]

I assume you have researched availability/pricing of cable(HIGH-SPEED) in your locale. Just as a matter of of interest, how much does does your dial-up cost compared to high-speed? Just interested.

Best of luck.

M
here(BC/Canada)
dailup is about 15-20$/month for a hand full of hours

2mbps adsl is about 30
cable is about the same

[Astrophizz]

Dial up near where I live is like $10/month unlimited. I get 21 mbps down/2 mbps up for $60/month. 7 mbps down/1 mbps up is like $45/month if not bundled. Something like 2 mbps would probably cost $30-40. The prices have remained stagnant for 7+ years. Soon they'll be adding bandwidth caps in my area for my service - I hope they drop the price if they do :(

[benwaggoner]

There's a ton of great data in the new Akamai "State of the Internet" report:

http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

With real-world testing, they show 63% of US internet can get more than 2 Mbps. And that's actual speed to Akamai, not provisioned speed.

[turbojet]

I've heard that roughly 8% of the US population doesn't have access to broadband though obama's 'stimulus' package is supposed to signifigantly lower this. I'm going to guess it's higher in some other fairly civilized countries like northern Australia/New Zealand, some asian and some african countries. Currently in the USA they seem to be doing a lot more of the improving already high speed connections (FIOS) as opposed to dealing with offering the rural community broadband, which I can understand takes a lot of infrastructure. I guess there's always overpriced satellite internet for rural places though.

Bandwidth caps are becoming more and more common. While I can understand their reasons for limiting illegal activities they are also affecting legitimate streaming. If you take 100GB (typical in canada, uk, australia some places are even lower) cap and are streaming HD stuff like from netflix or cbs/abc/fox/nbc a casual internet user could often exceed the bandwidth limit.

[benwaggoner]

I've heard that roughly 8% of the US population doesn't have access to broadband though obama's 'stimulus' package is supposed to signifigantly lower this. I'm going to guess it's higher in some other fairly civilized countries like northern Australia/New Zealand, some asian and some african countries. Currently in the USA they seem to be doing a lot more of the improving already high speed connections (FIOS) as opposed to dealing with offering the rural community broadband, which I can understand takes a lot of infrastructure. I guess there's always overpriced satellite internet for rural places though.
A recent survey of those without broadband suggested that 2/3rd of people who don't have it simply don't want it, and say there's nothing that would get them to change their minds.

Now, obviously that'll change over time as IP becomes how all data is delivered.

But until then, those peope aren't going to be watching web video anyway, so they're not really part of the audience.

But being able to send 2 Mbps to 63% of the population is pretty huge! And 25% can do a 5 Mbps stream. And these numbers are going up quickly.

I think 1080p web video is going to be realistic for a decent chunk of the population by the end of 2010.

[Esurnir]

A recent survey of those without broadband suggested that 2/3rd of people who don't have it simply don't want it, and say there's nothing that would get them to change their minds.

Now, obviously that'll change over time as IP becomes how all data is delivered.

But until then, those peope aren't going to be watching web video anyway, so they're not really part of the audience.

But being able to send 2 Mbps to 63% of the population is pretty huge! And 25% can do a 5 Mbps stream. And these numbers are going up quickly.

I think 1080p web video is going to be realistic for a decent chunk of the population by the end of 2010.

Save one detail, web delivery is viewed by PCs, not living room tv, the evolution of net speed is not matched with the evolution of computer screen size.

I currently have a 1366x768 screen on this laptop, last time I saw the number the average is around 1280x1024 or even 1024x768. Do we -really- need 1080p content on the web when most users don't have a screen larger than a 1280x720 video ?

[Shinigami-Sama]

Save one detail, web delivery is viewed by PCs, not living room tv, the evolution of net speed is not matched with the evolution of computer screen size.

I currently have a 1366x768 screen on this laptop, last time I saw the number the average is around 1280x1024 or even 1024x768. Do we -really- need 1080p content on the web when most users don't have a screen larger than a 1280x720 video ?

if people can watch their favourite TV show via streaming in HD
they'll invest in that 250$ HD monitor

[benwaggoner]

Save one detail, web delivery is viewed by PCs, not living room tv, the evolution of net speed is not matched with the evolution of computer screen size.
That distinction is already going away. Plenty of people hook up PC or PC-like devices to their big screens. And we've already announced Silverlight for phones (Windows Mobile and Symbian). Architecturally, a set-top-box is a lot like a phone with a really big screen. There's nothing about Silverlight or Smooth Streaming that couldn't fit in a STB or even an integrated processor in a TV in a a few years.

I currently have a 1366x768 screen on this laptop, last time I saw the number the average is around 1280x1024 or even 1024x768. Do we -really- need 1080p content on the web when most users don't have a screen larger than a 1280x720 video ?
Lots of people won't be able to take advantage of it, sure. One thing we're doing with Smooth Streaming is checking on screen size and browser window size so that we don't send people video much larger than they can use.

But we could provide it for those who could take advantage of it.

[turbojet]

But being able to send 2 Mbps to 63% of the population is pretty huge! And 25% can do a 5 Mbps stream. And these numbers are going up quickly.

I think 1080p web video is going to be realistic for a decent chunk of the population by the end of 2010.

I'm surprised netflix and amazon aren't offering 1080p streams for consumer electronics already. But this willl have to fight against ISP's growing interest in bandwidth caps.

[benwaggoner]

I'm surprised netflix and amazon aren't offering 1080p streams for consumer electronics already. But this willl have to fight against ISP's growing interest in bandwidth caps.
1080p is also a lot to decode on lower-end machines.

As for bandwidth caps, I'm hoping the proxy cachability of Smooth Streaming will reduce the pain of streaming for ISPs. Since it's just a bunch of files via http, they can get away with web QoS. And lots of people watching the same thing is only the bandwidth of a single person watching it from the ISP perspective.

and speaking of Smooth Streaming, we've got a new demo page up which is a little more technical than SmoothHD.com:

http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

[CruNcher]

Nice interface :) and it's fast and really light on the CPU not like Flash Players if you work multimedia wise with a lot of tabs and flash processes you really begin to hate Flash and love Silverlight :)
Flash Video Playback can be disturbed by so many things it's unbelievable how unreliable it currently is in heavy usage scenarios Silverlight always wins (no stuttering if more instances are running) it seems todo it's prioritizing much cleaner :). All that that moved to flash streaming will sooner or later realize they should have better waited :D
I really see Silverlight as one of Microsofts best developed technologies currently and im amazed how clean it was designed and done :)

Silverlight + SVC will be the future :), you can also see in this presentation that the reaction time of the chunked encoding here is to slow visually it needs to be faster i guess the clip here has it's Keyframes far away of each other it takes around 29 seconds to adapt ? Adaptibility needs to be going on the Decoder side completely not via the Encoder doing this workaround isn't really efficient @ all but it will make some happy :)

[benwaggoner]

Nice interface :) and it's fast and really light on the CPU not like Flash Players if you work multimedia wise with a lot of tabs and flash processes you really begin to hate Flash and love Silverlight :)
We're working really hard on improving performance. The final SL3 will be better yet than SL2.

And I just noticed that this player is actually doing a 2-pixel scale, so it's not getting our Fast Path; so it should be even faster in a few days :).

Flash Video Playback can be disturbed by so many things it's unbelievable how unreliable it currently is in heavy usage scenarios Silverlight always wins (no stuttering if more instances are running) it seems todo it's prioritizing much cleaner :). All that that moved to flash streaming will sooner or later realize they should have better waited :D
I really see Silverlight as one of Microsofts best developed technologies currently and im amazed how clean it was designed and done :)
Thanks! We're doing a lot of work on the media pipeline and decoders to keep framerate high and not waste cycles. GPU compositing in SL3 will help reduce CPU load even further, particuarly for full-screen playback.

[hajj_3]

just curious about silverlight licensing costs, lets say a website with 1m views per day of a certain video, would it be cheaper for them to go with silverlight or flash? I presume you are undercutting adobe in terms of pricing, would be a bit crazy if you charged more, especially as alot of people wouldnt be able to view the videos as they'd have to download silverlight.

do you have an approximate eta for silverlight3 e.g Q2 2009?

Will silverlight 2.0/3.0 be installed on windows 7 by default? Hope it is, would help you push websites to using silverlight compared to flash as less people would need to download it. Will you be getting OEM manufacturers to install silverlight by default eg Dell, HP etc as i'm fairly sure some OEM's may have flash installed by default. If it is installed by default on windows7 i presume there is an option to uninstall it, dont want you guys to get in trouble with the EU again.

[benwaggoner]

just curious about silverlight licensing costs, lets say a website with 1m views per day of a certain video, would it be cheaper for them to go with silverlight or flash? I presume you are undercutting adobe in terms of pricing, would be a bit crazy if you charged more, especially as alot of people wouldnt be able to view the videos as they'd have to download silverlight.
Both Silverlight and Flash are free and include necessary decoder licenses. So it's more about TCO cost differences than deployment costs. And that's where we have a huge advantage for media delivery. Smooth Streaming is a free ad-in for IIS, and so available for <$400 versions of Windows Sever 2008. Flash Media Server costs quite a big multiple of that.

Also, due to proxy caching and pre-encryption, you likely would need many fewer IIS servers than Flash servers for the same audience size.

do you have an approximate eta for silverlight3 e.g Q2 2009?
"Later this year" was what Scott Guthrie announced at MIX.

Will silverlight 2.0/3.0 be installed on windows 7 by default? Hope it is, would help you push websites to using silverlight compared to flash as less people would need to download it. Will you be getting OEM manufacturers to install silverlight by default eg Dell, HP etc as i'm fairly sure some OEM's may have flash installed by default. If it is installed by default on windows7 i presume there is an option to uninstall it, dont want you guys to get in trouble with the EU again.
Silverlight isn't part of Windows 7. Which is not to say that it won't come preinstalled on machines, but that'd be up to the OEMs (some of which have announced they'll be preinstalling Silverlight).

[TEB]

1080p is also a lot to decode on lower-end machines.

As for bandwidth caps, I'm hoping the proxy cachability of Smooth Streaming will reduce the pain of streaming for ISPs. Since it's just a bunch of files via http, they can get away with web QoS. And lots of people watching the same thing is only the bandwidth of a single person watching it from the ISP perspective.

and speaking of Smooth Streaming, we've got a new demo page up which is a little more technical than SmoothHD.com:

http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

Awesome video displaying where SL is going. A question if u dont mind Ben ;)
1. When i slide the constrained bandwith meter up and down it takes around 10sec until one see a difference. Now i can understand that on the way down, since the decode prolly has a big buffer to eat of, but on the way up, why does it take it in 1 by 1 steps? and not from minimum to maximum (i slid the bar from 400kbit to 2,4mbit). Why doesnt the client try the best bandwith ? Could u please elaborate a little bit more on how this "detection" work? I can see on trickplay skipping that the client sometimes trottles up bw 1 step by 1, and the next time i skip it can go from minimum to max..

best regards TEB

[CruNcher]

Ben btw what is your team doing in terms of multimedia thread prioritization inside the web browser most still do a bad job here i mean just open some tabs with Flash advertising and the Silverlight Showcase or a Flash Video and it will happen fast that one of these applications is gonna suffer :( i guess you could tell the customer to just have 1 tab with the application open and try to avoid any other stuff but that's not very practical i hope browsers multimedia performance gets enhanced in the future currently it seems to play only a secondary role (a more stable multimedia experience inside the browser). There should be some stuff being done like giving a tab higher priority when it is in focus and a Video is playing inside of it so basically suspending the other instances in the other tabs for that time hope such similar stuff is soon finding it's way into browser. I already did some Browser tests in those regards and it's interesting to see the results between the most known ones :) and how different they all handle this but all lack in this some way or another i gonna take IE8 into my Benchmark of this next :). In my heaviest test i open around 200 tabs and a Flash Player instance with the others having all kind of Flash Content loaded it's interesting to see how that makes Video Playback virtual impossible without continues brake ups ;) im wondering how Silverlight 3 will do in this Scenario ?

[benwaggoner]

Ben btw what is your team doing in terms of multimedia thread prioritization inside the web browser most still do a bad job here i mean just open some tabs with Flash advertising and the Silverlight Showcase or a Flash Video and it will happen fast that one of these applications is gonna suffer :( i guess you could tell the customer to just have 1 tab with the application open and try to avoid any other stuff but that's not very practical i hope browsers multimedia performance gets enhanced in the future currently it seems to play only a secondary role (a more stable multimedia experience inside the browser).
Well, WPF and hence Silverlight were designed to gracefully scale with the system they're running on and the resources they have available. One big difference between XAML and Flash is that XAML is inherantly time-based, not frame-based. So animations just go at the speed they can in Silverlight, quite a bit more smoothly. And you don't have to worry about having all the elements in a player being the same frame rate.

When we were working on the Olympics, we saw a huge CPU spike in some players which we jumped in to debug. It turns out that it was a Flash banner add on the page that was eating up 4x the CPU power as the Silverlight media player.

There should be some stuff being done like giving a tab higher priority when it is in focus and a Video is playing inside of it so basically suspending the other instances in the other tabs for that time hope such similar stuff is soon finding it's way into browser. I already did some Browser tests in those regards and it's interesting to see the results between the most known ones :) and how different they all handle this but all lack in this some way or another i gonna take IE8 into my Benchmark of this next :). In my heaviest test i open around 200 tabs and a Flash Player instance with the others having all kind of Flash Content loaded it's interesting to see how that makes Video Playback virtual impossible without continues brake ups ;) im wondering how Silverlight 3 will do in this Scenario ?
I don't know that we've tested 200 players at once :). But in Smooth Streaming, we adapt bitrate based on both CPU power (reducing data rate when dropped frames gets too high) and frame size (no reason to require HD decode when the browser window is shrunk down). I'm not sure what we're currently doing based on focus, but that'd be an obvious other place to take some advantage.

[benwaggoner]

Awesome video displaying where SL is going. A question if u dont mind Ben ;)
1. When i slide the constrained bandwith meter up and down it takes around 10sec until one see a difference. Now i can understand that on the way down, since the decode prolly has a big buffer to eat of, but on the way up, why does it take it in 1 by 1 steps? and not from minimum to maximum (i slid the bar from 400kbit to 2,4mbit). Why doesnt the client try the best bandwith? Could u please elaborate a little bit more on how this "detection" work? I can see on trickplay skipping that the client sometimes trottles up bw 1 step by 1, and the next time i skip it can go from minimum to max..

There's a whole lot of heurstics under there. And the slider isn't acting as an override to the heuristcs, but as input for the estimated bitrate; other logic is still taking place. Sometimes it'll just 5 bitrates, sometimes one, depending on how fast chunks are taking to download, how many chunks are in the buffer, etcetera.

Also, I think that version tries to buffer ahead up to 20 seconds of video, so even if you crank the bitrate way down, it might not respond immediately; it'll start requesting future chunks at the lower bitrate, but if it's already cached a higher quality version of a given chunk, it'll use that one.

The good news is that the heristics are all in managed code and delivered on-demand when media playback is about to start, so it can be tuned as often as desired, and be made as specific to a particular content site and its customers as desired. So expect rapid evolution and improvement of the client. It's not like Windows Media Player where we only had one chance to lock in stream-switching logic every couple of years.

[hajj_3]

Silverlight isn't part of Windows 7. Which is not to say that it won't come preinstalled on machines, but that'd be up to the OEMs (some of which have announced they'll be preinstalling Silverlight).

Its a shame its not in windows7 by default, it would really help in websites deciding to use silverlight as they wouldnt need to download an installer to use their website. Like with .net framework, its great that its included in vista and windows7, now alot of software is made in .net but if they didnt include .net then the .net platform would have never taken off.

Lets hope steve ballmer decides to include silverlight in win7 with the option to uninstall it or even include it and during installation of windows7 you can choose to install it or not.

[TEB]

There's a whole lot of heurstics under there. And the slider isn't acting as an override to the heuristcs, but as input for the estimated bitrate; other logic is still taking place. Sometimes it'll just 5 bitrates, sometimes one, depending on how fast chunks are taking to download, how many chunks are in the buffer, etcetera.

Also, I think that version tries to buffer ahead up to 20 seconds of video, so even if you crank the bitrate way down, it might not respond immediately; it'll start requesting future chunks at the lower bitrate, but if it's already cached a higher quality version of a given chunk, it'll use that one.

The good news is that the heristics are all in managed code and delivered on-demand when media playback is about to start, so it can be tuned as often as desired, and be made as specific to a particular content site and its customers as desired. So expect rapid evolution and improvement of the client. It's not like Windows Media Player where we only had one chance to lock in stream-switching logic every couple of years.

Hi. Dont get me wrong, cause i like the example with 5 different stream qualities.. But i just dont get how the player heuristics work when its allowed to use more bandwith (sliding the slider up to max).. Why it uses so long time to "understand" that its got "niagrafalls" to use ;)

[RNiK]

and speaking of Smooth Streaming, we've got a new demo page up which is a little more technical than SmoothHD.com:

http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreamingSweet demo! :cool:

Silverlight is indeed a promising technology in the AVC scene.

[benwaggoner]

And at NAB, we're also showing H.264 running at 720p24 on a Core 2 Duo inside Silverlight, with a pretty full featured (CABAC, pyramid B, lots of reference frames) 2.5 Mbps x264 encode. We've also got VC-1 working at 1080p24.

Some other news from the show:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/NAB-Day-1-Smooth-Streaming-released-1080p-in-Silverlight-new-VC-1-and-more/#Page=1

[Kurtnoise]

For the Tennis fanboys, you can see Rolland Garros (http://roland-garros.france2.fr/?page=exclusif_HD) through your web browser within SL - Smooth Streaming @720p :

http://uppix.net/a/e/8/ded836f34cd85c4fbfdd7c4e5389e.png (http://uppix.net/a/e/8/ded836f34cd85c4fbfdd7c4e5389e.html)

Looks great to me :)...and you can record & replay live streamings too. :eek:

[TEB]

looks cewl, but only for ze french...

[hajj_3]

any news on Silverlight3 going GOLD yet? Have you not made a decision on when you will start making a 64bit version yet? You got a nice tasty 64bit IE8 begging for it and if you released it im sure firefox and chrome 64bit betas would be released, maybe even safari. Even apple are going all 64bit in Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leapord, you could create a 64bit version that works with mac osx 10.6's safari 64bit too. There's obviously been 64bit ubuntu for quite some time and with netbooks being released alot 64bit silverlight would mean they could use minefield for alot more sites and use alot less of their very slow cpu's.

Im sure you could create a 64bit compatible version that wasnt optimised for 64bit so that people can use silverlight sites on 64bit browsers then later down the line you could optimise the code to take advantage of 64bit properly.

Show apple who's boss instead of being reactive. OSX 10.6 will likely take off big time especially with the $29 price tag.

anyway hope to hear some good news in response to my questions.

[benwaggoner]

any news on Silverlight3 going GOLD yet? Have you not made a decision on when you will start making a 64bit version yet? You got a nice tasty 64bit IE8 begging for it and if you released it im sure firefox and chrome 64bit betas would be released, maybe even safari.
Silverlight 3 will be 32-bit only. You're correct that it's easy engineering, but it's a big increase in testing,

And it's not like 64-bit browsers are lots better at browsing or anything.

And it'll be a while until people don't need to run Flash. Until then, everyone's gong to be running 32-bit browsers for consumer media, and hence that's the only way they'd get Silverlight as well.

If we see the market share of 64-bit browsing go up, I'm sure we'll do it, but we haven't seen enough benefit in being 64-bit to justify dropping other features in favor of 64-bit.

[hajj_3]

the 64bit browser market wont increase until you and adobe release 64bit versions. I'm sure if you released a 64bit beta on here we could do loads of the testing for you, microsoft is still pulling healthy profits, surely you can afford to hire some testers? Theres no point creating a 64bit browser and then not supporting it with your own products. If you release a 64bit beta you will probably shame adobe into making a 64bit version as they wont want to see the competition with a better product in more way than just 1. You'd get some nice PR and publicity being the first to release a 64bit plugin, silverlight may then catch on instead of being a niche which is likely how it will stay as it wont be installed by default on windows7 like with .net not catching on fully until it was installed in vista by default as websites dont want users to download 8mb or so to be able to use their website.

Any news on it getting close to going gold yet?

[Snowknight26]

If we see the market share of 64-bit browsing go up, I'm sure we'll do it, but we haven't seen enough benefit in being 64-bit to justify dropping other features in favor of 64-bit.

So its a case of 'A after B only if B after A, where B after A only if A after B'. I believe the main reason for the lack of 64-bit browser market share is because of the lack of 64-bit addons such as flash, and now Silverlight.

[benwaggoner]

So its a case of 'A after B only if B after A, where B after A only if A after B'. I believe the main reason for the lack of 64-bit browser market share is because of the lack of 64-bit addons such as flash, and now Silverlight.
Indeed. But I don't think anyone would run a 64-bit browser who wants to run Silverlight but wouldn't also want to run Flash, yet.

Give us another six months and we'll see where we are :).

Also, what are you imaging is going to be better/different about 64-bit browsing? For databases, I'm sold, but the real-world perf difference is small (~10%?) for apps that don't need 2+ GB of RAM. Browsers don't need that much.

[Snowknight26]

Indeed. But I don't think anyone would run a 64-bit browser who wants to run Silverlight but wouldn't also want to run Flash, yet.

I meant that in terms of both Silverlight and Flash. :p

Also, what are you imaging is going to be better/different about 64-bit browsing? For databases, I'm sold, but the real-world perf difference is small (~10%?) for apps that don't need 2+ GB of RAM. Browsers don't need that much.

I can't say as I don't particularly have anything in mind apart from databases, but just having a complete 64-bit 'ecosystem' sounds appealing. No more 32-bit legacy support, no more instruction set architecture mixing.

[hajj_3]

10% is quite big in my oppinion, especially for 64bit atom cpu's in netbooks! you can just release a beta and leave it in beta for a while and im sure doom9 people and partners will find the bugs for you, im sure if you do that flash development will suddenly speed up immediately then we can all enjoy 64bit browsers, instead we have got 32bit IE as the default IE on vista and now even the brand spanking new windows7. Im sure if you released an x64 silverlight 2.0 then we'd have flash x64 already and you could have made the default IE in windows7 x64 the x64 version

[Dark Shikari]

10% is quite big in my oppinion, especially for 64bit atom cpu's in netbooks!And it'll be more than 10%, as extra registers tend to help more on in-order CPUs.

[benwaggoner]

And it'll be more than 10%, as extra registers tend to help more on in-order CPUs.
...balanced against having optimization efforts split over two different ISAs :).

Also, I'm not sure how much time browsers actually spend being CPU bound. Javascript parsing, sure, but I imagine most of the non-snappy is due to networking or other issues.

DS, just curious, what kinds of speedups do you see in x264 from 64-bit? It's a very different domain, of course.

[Dark Shikari]

DS, just curious, what kinds of speedups do you see in x264 from 64-bit? It's a very different domain, of course.10-15%, from what I recall.

[hajj_3]

send dark shikari some $$ in a suitcase, i'm sure he'll code an x64 version for you, with his optimisation skills i reckon he'd get it 20% faster.

[benwaggoner]

send dark shikari some $$ in a suitcase, i'm sure he'll code an x64 version for you, with his optimisation skills i reckon he'd get it 20% faster.
I suspect we're all better off not distracting him from making x264 better :)!

[Dark Shikari]

I suspect we're all better off not distracting him from making x264 better :)!Don't worry, Facebook and Corecodec are doing a good enough job at that already.

[Gabriel_Bouvigne]

10-15%, from what I recall.
Which is about we we got for LAME btw, just by recompiling.

[benwaggoner]

Which is about we we got for LAME btw, just by recompiling.
But bear in mind that compression is normally CPU bound; 10% faster code makes for 10% faster compression.

Browsers spend most of their time waiting for the user to do something, the network to deliver something, or wishing Flash would stop doing so much :). So being 10% faster for CPU bound operations may only mean 1% faster for doing any particular task.

[Razorholt]

GPU or not, 64 or 32 bit the bottom line is that a lot of people are not finding silverlight THAT impressive. I'm sorry but I may join the group or angry Netflix customers who are about to look at Blockbuster as an alternative - well, maybe not, but...

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/93943.aspx

So, why silverlight (2 or 3) makes the video so choppy? I know it does because I experienced it first hand. It's really unwatchable. Is there any plan to fix that issue before Microsoft releases s3?

Maybe it's due to the mp4 container? Any hints on how to encode the videos in order to avoid the chops then?


Thanks,
- Dan

[hajj_3]

Silverlight 3 is out NOW: http://silverlight.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/9/5/E/95E973B3-17C1-459B-AA1B-20827B867D15/Silverlight.exe

any decision been made to start development on 64bit version yet benwaggoner?

[benwaggoner]

Silverlight 3 is out NOW: http://silverlight.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/9/5/E/95E973B3-17C1-459B-AA1B-20827B867D15/Silverlight.exe
Razoerholt, maybe see if that improves your experience.

Of course, it won't use GPU compositing/scaling until Netflix updates the player with that flag on.

any decision been made to start development on 64bit version yet benwaggoner?
It really gets down to the stack rank of the feature list, where we weigh impact versus dev/test cost.

So, pitch me on why this feature is super important :)!

[hajj_3]

I believe its more important than adding additional features as Silverlight3 64bit would push adobe to act and release a 64bit version of flash which would then lead to 64bit versions of Firefox and Chrome and would allow 64bit windows users to use 64bit browsers which would give a significant performance increase. Also 64bit silverlight would allow videos to be smoother on 64bit netbooks which are becoming very popular but have very slow cpu's.

its unlikely they we will see a video and audio standard in HTML5 due to browser vendors not agreeing on theora or h264 and due to licensing costs firefox and opera would be unable to ship h264 capability. So flash and silverlight will be staying with us for quite some time, especially as there seems to be no word from MS whether they will choose h264 or theora in IE9 which with 60% of the browser share would pretty much force the other browser makers to use the same video standard. My suggestion for this would be for google, apple and MS to donate mozilla the licensing costs for h264 for firefox then they could all use h264 which is far better for the end user as mobile devices have h264 hardware decoding support and the video quality is better and could use lower bitrates so less bandwidth would be used.

So to re-iterate a 64bit silverlight would be very helpful for netbooks and would force adobe to bring out a 64bit flash far earlier than their 18month approx current timeframe which would lead to 64bit browsers.

think thats a pretty convincing argument dont u think? :)

You could then make 64bit IE the default IE in vista and windows7 with their next service packs.

silverlight3 seems very good already there's not that much that shouts out in wanted features more than a 64bit version, i'm sure it wouldn't take that much coding and testing, especially now silverlight3 32bit is complete.

MS has the power to make the internet so much better by making h264 the default codec in HTML5 standard and integrated into IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and has the power to force adobe to release a 64bit flash which would then allow 64bit browsers they just need to spend a little of their $$$. Google's Chrome browser will be getting h264 integrated and youtube will be going h264 atleast for browsers that have h264 integrated which would save them alot of money as they serve 1billion videos a day and adobe's flash requires alot more servers i believe so its financially beneficial for them to scrap flash and use h264 that will be integrate in chrome and safari.

[benwaggoner]

So to re-iterate a 64bit silverlight would be very helpful for netbooks and would force adobe to bring out a 64bit flash far earlier than their 18month approx current timeframe which would lead to 64bit browsers.
Well, I don't know if 64-bit browsing really would make that much of a performance benefit for Netbooks. And if we're worried about Netbook performance, there are other things we could do that would help 32-bit and 64-bit OS users on Netbooks by a bigger factor than 64-bit native relative to the dev/test cost.

Not to say we're not going to do it, or not going to do it on any particular schedule. I'm just tring to explain how we weigh things in figuring out the feature list for particular releases.

Oh, and here's some SL3 media info from me:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/My-Silverlight-3-preview-up-at-StreamingMediacom/

[hajj_3]

do you have any info on whether MS has decided to integrate h264 or theora in IE9? The other browser vendors have already decided but there doesn't seem to be any information on the internet of what MS has decided to do, with a 60% browser share and plenty of money to pay for h264 licensing costs, especially with windows7 already having h264 support in WMP11. Or maybe you could pass on my query to a colleague from a relevant department.

If MS does decide to integrate h264 in IE9 and h264 becomes a standard in a future HTML standard then i presume silverlight will still carry on as h264 wont have gpu decoding support or anything i PRESUME?

[Dark Shikari]

do you have any info on whether MS has decided to integrate h264 or theora in IE9? The other browser vendors have already decided but there doesn't seem to be any information on the internet of what MS has decided to do, with a 60% browser share and plenty of money to pay for h264 licensing costs, especially with windows7 already having h264 support in WMP11. Or maybe you could pass on my query to a colleague from a relevant department.

If MS does decide to integrate h264 in IE9 and h264 becomes a standard in a future HTML standard then i presume silverlight will still carry on as h264 wont have gpu decoding support or anything i PRESUME?Microsoft will probably just use DirectShow and Media Foundation, no need to be retarded and integrate decoders into the browser.

[Razorholt]

@ben: yes, the experience is better. Have you guys disabled the hardware decoding?

[hajj_3]

will that work on WinXP though dark shikari? as only windows7 has h264 support in WMP11. what would happen with licensing as ms will be paying mpeg group alot of $$ for h264 support in WMP11 on Win7. All ms needs to do is to tell everyone h264 support will be in IE9 and donate mozilla some $ and then everyone can use h264 for HTML5, opera has such a small market share but ms could donate them some $$ too. Apple would benefit too as the iphone could play videos from sites smoothly. without funding for mozilla h264 will never kick off, they have a big browser market share now but dont operate to make money so can't pay h264 fees. Would be a nice gesture for MS to pay some money, it would probably reduce their chance of the EU suing them again by seeing them donate to a competitor for the good of technological industry improvements.

p.s you should rename this topic now as silverlight3 isn't beta anymore:)

[benwaggoner]

do you have any info on whether MS has decided to integrate h264 or theora in IE9?
IE8 came out pretty recently. I haven't talked with anyone on the IE team about this personally, but I doubt they've locked-down the final feature list for IE9 yet.

...then i presume silverlight will still carry on as h264 wont have gpu decoding support or anything i PRESUME?
I don't know why you'd make that presumption. We've been all software so far because that's what the hardware in the market could best support, but we make our choices about that kind of thing pragmatically.

[benwaggoner]

@ben: yes, the experience is better. Have you guys disabled the hardware decoding?
It's off by default, because GPU acceleration can actually cause a performance regression with some kinds of apps that use a whole lot of layers.

It's a no-brainer for media players, though, and the "base player" we distribute for people to use as a starting point does default to GPU being on.

But existing players will need to be upated to take advantage of it.

[CruNcher]

so benwaggoner according to what you say GPU Decoding for Silverlight is stalling @ the moment so i presume Adobe and Nvidia will be first that gonna present this early next year ?
And alot later Microsoft ? and how about using Shed Devices say Quartics chip to decode Silverlight Video Online content ?
Will there be a unique secure interface for all Devices or individual ones ? (XP,Vista(Win7))
I mean if you will realize it over Media Foundation it will be Vista and Win7 only but what is with XP ? or do you actually have no plans for XP anymore with in Browser Content GPU Decoding as the whole GPU ecosystem (Scheduling,Managing,Interfaces support) was introduced with Vista ?

A XP solution for this sounds like extra effort from Microsoft side and i fear you gonna skip this and maybe Adobe & Nvidia also :(

[benwaggoner]

so benwaggoner according to what you say GPU Decoding for Silverlight is stalling @ the moment so i presume Adobe and Nvidia will be first that gonna present this early next year ?
Silverlight 3, which launched today, uses the GPU for compositing and scaling, but not for decoding.

I don't know Adobe's schedule, so I'm not going to speculate as to whether Flash 11 or Silverlight 4 makes it to market first. And I'm certainly not going to start announcing features for it yet :). We need you guys to tell us how Silverlight 3 is first.

[hajj_3]

I seemed to be offered a hotfix for silverlight today on XP and on Win7x64, it is several mb, about the same size as the full installer, what is fixed in this hotfix? Will i be able to download the NEW full installer so i dont have to install silverlight 3 and then the hotfix each time I format my pc?

thanks.

[benwaggoner]

I seemed to be offered a hotfix for silverlight today on XP and on Win7x64, it is several mb, about the same size as the full installer, what is fixed in this hotfix? Will i be able to download the NEW full installer so i dont have to install silverlight 3 and then the hotfix each time I format my pc?

It's a new full installer, not a delta update. We only offer the current version for download from the main site at any given time. Developers have access to old builds, but we make sure users only get the current version of the moment.

We did several minor updates like this for Silverlight 1.0 and 2 as well, without any issue.

[hajj_3]

ok cool:) Wish you did that with some of your other products like .NET 1.1, .NET 3.5 etc:( Or atleast have a seperate link for new full installers for advanced users as i have several pc's and reformat and change installations every few months, after installing .net 1.1 or 3.5 i have to download some pretty large updates off windows update, i'm not saying make the new full installers the default as they may conflict with visual studio and software houses' applications but there should be an option for a new full installer. Its like with Adobe reader, unfortunately you have to download adobe reader 9.10 and then have to update to 9.13 with the updater, i'd rather just download a new full installer of 9.13

Is there a changelog available, can't see 1 on your site, would be handy to add a changelog for changes between each public build. New silverlight and new flash on the same day = :) flash's changelog was around 10 security hole fixes.

p.s you still need to change this topic from: "Silverlight 3 beta with H.264 support available" to: "Silverlight 3 with H.264 support available"

[benwaggoner]

ok cool:) Wish you did that with some of your other products like .NET 1.1, .NET 3.5 etc:( Or atleast have a seperate link for new full installers for advanced users as i have several pc's and reformat and change installations every few months, after installing .net 1.1 or 3.5 i have to download some pretty large updates off windows update, i'm not saying make the new full installers the default as they may conflict with visual studio and software houses' applications but there should be an option for a new full installer. Its like with Adobe reader, unfortunately you have to download adobe reader 9.10 and then have to update to 9.13 with the updater, i'd rather just download a new full installer of 9.13
Yeah, servicing is a big deal and tricky to manage. I know the .NET guys are trying to make this easier. But there's another plus to Win 7 there for you :).

We have it easy with Silverlight since we don't have any OS dependencies and the OS doesn't have dependencies on Silverlight, so we can be basically one big library that gets updated wholesale.

Is there a changelog available, can't see 1 on your site, would be handy to add a changelog for changes between each public build. New silverlight and new flash on the same day = :) flash's changelog was around 10 security hole fixes.
There's this.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1b7a3205-b5f8-4e20-bf42-792de5923454&displaylang=en&tm

I do not know why it's a download of an .html file instead of a web page. It hasn't been updated for the new release yet, though.

But I'm MUCH happier to have a fix for media performance than security reasons. Knock on wood, but we haven't had to do a single security patch for Silverlight so far.

[hajj_3]

maybe you could have a link on microsoft.com/silverlight and silverlight.net to the changelog as i looked on both and couldn't find the changelog.

EDIT: just noticed you said the changelog hasn't been updated on that link yet. Seems a shame to have the changelog not updated and no changelog links on the 2 official silverlight sites on the day of release:(

[popper]

ben, given the consumers have just been offered places from the 20th of last month for the Signup to the Xbox LIVE Update Preview Program http://majornelson.com/archive/2009/07/20/xbox-360-system-update-preview-program.aspx

is there a list somewere with all the additions and updates they intend adding to this latest firmware,we dont get that many firmware updates so its important right now with all the below going on dont you think ?, is there ANY real [streaming] video related things going into this new firmware?

id hope they are giving [HD]video streaming content and updated codecs/containers a high priority this time around, given the current silverlight3 release, new Smooth Streaming technology coming into play http://www.cmstreamservice.com/

http://blog.cmstream.net/

AND the new "Play To" feature in Windows 7 http://on10.net/blogs/nic/Windows-7-Play-To-feature-turns-your-PC-into-a-Universal-Remote-Control/

all coming to a head real soon now, i fear its not though, as the left hand dont seem to know what the right hands doing over at MS labs right now..

if you have time, perhaps you can nip over there and point out the obvious, that we NEED new faster altivec optimised AVC codecs and containers (and a 360 browser [+IPv6 stack] for multicast use etc ;) ) and a Smooth Streaming segmentor so we can stream and perhaps even use the idle 360 for this and many other video related tasks if we are given the tools to do so inside the firmware....

[benwaggoner]

ben, given the consumers have just been offered places from the 20th of last month for the Signup to the Xbox LIVE Update Preview Program http://majornelson.com/archive/2009/07/20/xbox-360-system-update-preview-program.aspx

is there a list somewere with all the additions and updates they intend adding to this latest firmware,we dont get that many firmware updates so its important right now with all the below going on dont you think ?, is there ANY real [streaming] video related things going into this new firmware?
There is the big 1080p streaming update coming soon, but I'm not sure if that's in this firmware or not.

Honestly, with the launched of Silverlight and Expression Encoder 3, plus finishing my book, I've been completely out of the loop on the new Xbox 360 firmware. I know some stuff about the 1080p video service, but that's about it.

id hope they are giving [HD]video streaming content and updated codecs/containers a high priority this time around, given the current silverlight3 release, new Smooth Streaming technology coming into play http://www.cmstreamservice.com/
The codec support as of the 2007 update handles everything we're doing in Smooth Streaming and more, honestly.

AND the new "Play To" feature in Windows 7 http://on10.net/blogs/nic/Windows-7-Play-To-feature-turns-your-PC-into-a-Universal-Remote-Control/
That should work just fine with the 360; IIRC it'll support any extender based on its declared compatibility.

I haven't tried with MKV yet, but I think it should work...

all coming to a head real soon now, i fear its not though, as the left hand dont seem to know what the right hands doing over at MS labs right now..
Which lab? We have so many :).

Really, there's a ton of internal collaboration. A lot of Xbox/Zune work made it into Expression Encoder 3, Silverlight has been shown on the 360, etcetera. But in the end different businesses make releases on their own schedule, focusing on what's critical for them.

if you have time, perhaps you can nip over there and point out the obvious, that we NEED new faster altivec optimised AVC codecs and containers (and a 360 browser [+IPv6 stack] for multicast use etc ;) ) and a Smooth Streaming segmentor so we can stream and perhaps even use the idle 360 for this and many other video related tasks if we are given the tools to do so inside the firmware....
Do you have some samples of AVC files that should work but don't?

No idea about a browser. I'm not really sure how much sense that makes for a console that generally won't even have a keyboard. The PS3 brower has been a PITA every time I tried to use it. "Brower" implies so much else in terms of plugin support etcetera that it's hard to imagine anyong being happy with a basic one.

What do you mean by "Smooth Streaming segmentor?"

In the end, the 360 is meant as a game console first, with a lot of other content consumption features. The team is really focused on making the experience better and deeper in the core areas, and pretty dilligent about not getting distracted by potentially cool things that wouldn't make a positive impact on console, game, and Live subscription sales.

If you want a highly programmable platform, you've got Windows :).

[hajj_3]

It has just been announced that a linux 64bit version of chrome beta is out and that 64bit versions of chrome for mac osx and windows will be out soon. Will you now start development on 64bit silverlight for windows, mac osx and linux?

source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/64-bit-Google-Chrome-for-Windows-Soon-120286.shtml

If 64bit firefox, chrome, safari, silverlight, flash came out within the next 12 months do you know if MS will make 64bit IE the default version in Vista & Windows 7 with future service packs?

p.s please remove "beta" from the topic title as silverlight 3 is no longer beta.

[Razorholt]

@ben: it would be helpful if people who installed the beta version of S3 would at least get noticed about the (final) public release.

Cheers,
- Dan

[Kurtnoise]

@ben: it would be helpful if people who installed the beta version of S3 would at least get noticed about the (final) public release.

iirc, you receive a notification from windows update...

[Razorholt]

iirc, you receive a notification from windows update...
If you have installed the Silverlight Developer version (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=143433) you won't receive any updates. What you'll need to do is to uninstall it first and THEN install the current version.

[hajj_3]

has the silverlight team made a decision on a 64bit version for 64bit IE/Chrome?

[hajj_3]

whats the changelog for: Silverlight 3.0.40818 previous version i've had for around 6 weeks was: Silverlight 3.0.40723

[Kurtnoise]

@Ben: http://directshow4sl.codeplex.com/

Maybe it deserves an entry in your blog ?

:)

[benwaggoner]

Well, that's a pile of awesome! I didn't even know about it.

[hajj_3]

no news on silverlight 4 beta (non sdk)? any 64bit versions being developed? linux support? please remove beta tag from this thread as v3 went final many months ago.

[ForceX]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/01/why-microsoft-isnt-working-on-silverlight-64-bit.ars

[hajj_3]

that sucks:( Chrome 64bit will be out soon, you'd have thought that would be enough incentive to release a 64bit silverlight, aswell as 64bit IE6-8 that have been out for 6yrs. Adobe has already stated 64bit flash is coming after flash 10.1. MS just posted huge Q1 profits yet they can spend a small amount on a 64bit silverlight :(

[lnatan25]

Adobe has been stating that "64-bit Windows Flash is just around the corner" for years now. First it was for 9, then after 9, then for 10, then 10.1, now after 10.1. :rolleyes:

[Kurtnoise]

no news on silverlight 4 beta (non sdk)? any 64bit versions being developed? linux support?
will be in Silverlight 5 (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/)...

[hajj_3]

yep :)