Silverlight/Moonlight related Questions

Michal Docekal michal at krkavec.net
Thu Jan 5 18:01:06 UTC 2012


Hello,

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

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

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 turned to be a disaster (it worked, but performance
couldn't have been much worse) and one Windows-based media publishing
system, which uses silverlight for playing presentations, but playback
didn't work at all (I'm not sure if it is a Moonlight issue, though).

I should also mention that playing videos through Moonlight requires
downloading proprietary codecs.

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

> 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.

No idea there.

Regards,
Michal Docekal

Dne Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:26:03 +0100
Martin Husovec <husovec at fsfe.org> napsal(a):

> 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



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