Silverlight 3 beta with H.264 support available [Archive] - Page 2

IgorC

3rd April 2009, 03:01

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

3rd April 2009, 05:06

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

3rd April 2009, 06:00

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

3rd April 2009, 17:38

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

3rd April 2009, 19:08

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

4th April 2009, 23:58

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

5th April 2009, 10:47

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

5th April 2009, 18:27

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

5th April 2009, 20:35

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

5th April 2009, 23:03

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

6th April 2009, 00:18

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

6th April 2009, 14:59

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

6th April 2009, 18:03

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

6th April 2009, 19:40

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

6th April 2009, 20:11

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

8th April 2009, 13:41

benwaggoner

10th April 2009, 04:22

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

11th April 2009, 12:18

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

11th April 2009, 17:27

benwaggoner

11th April 2009, 22:51

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

11th April 2009, 22:57

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

13th April 2009, 14:09

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

13th April 2009, 18:25

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

21st April 2009, 10:27

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

21st April 2009, 15:13

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

27th May 2009, 13:49

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

27th May 2009, 16:50

looks cewl, but only for ze french...

hajj_3

11th June 2009, 03:59

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

11th June 2009, 04:16

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

11th June 2009, 04:53

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

11th June 2009, 04:54

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

11th June 2009, 05:30

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

11th June 2009, 06:36

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

11th June 2009, 10:19

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

11th June 2009, 16:57

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

11th June 2009, 20:02

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

11th June 2009, 20:04

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

11th June 2009, 23:56

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

12th June 2009, 08:53

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

12th June 2009, 08:58

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

12th June 2009, 09:53

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

benwaggoner

12th June 2009, 17:54

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

7th July 2009, 05:07

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

9th July 2009, 22:16

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

9th July 2009, 22:31

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

9th July 2009, 23:06

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

9th July 2009, 23:17

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

9th July 2009, 23:25

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?