Silverlight/Moonlight related Questions

[Michal Docekal]

Hello,

> 1. What is the cross-platform availability of Silverlight? Any
> experience?  

A little. I looked at it a while ago. For GNU/Linux, there are some
browser plugins (Moonlight project), but they didn't work out of the
box. Firefox marked that plugin as incompatibile, so I had to disable
the version check to make it work. Chromium didn't work at all.

Using Firefox, I tested it on two things - Microsoft's smooth streaming
demo site (silverlight-based media player adapting to client's CPU and
network bandwith), which worked, but performance couldn't have been
much worse (slideshow instead of playback) and one Windows-based media
publishing system, which uses silverlight for playing presentations,
but playback didn't work there at all (I'm not sure if it is a
Moonlight issue, though).

I didn't test it anywhere else and I quickly removed it from my
machine afterwards.

I should also mention that playing videos through Moonlight requires
downloading proprietary codecs (which is handled by the plugin).

> 2. Do you have any information about the deal between Microsoft [...]

No idea there.

Regards,
Michal Docekal



On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:26:03 +0100
Martin Husovec <husovec at fsfe.org> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I was wondering if anybody could help us here with these two questions
> which both relate to Silverlight/Moonlight. So:
> 
> 1. What is the cross-platform availability of Silverlight? Any
> experience?
>         
> 2. Do you have any information about the deal between Microsoft and
> Novel concerning Silverlight and Moonlight. Is is true that Microsoft
> tries to release the specifications with some delay? So actually the
> Moonlight can not work well even if the community tries. What is the
> overall background of Moonlight development & release.
> 
> Your help would be highly appreciated,
> 
> Martin