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Silverlight 3 now available for your Flash-killing pleasure
There are significant updates under the hood with major ramifications. First, Silverlight has always been adept at handling streaming video. But Smooth Streaming, which debuted at E3, allows you to watch HD video instantly. As Neowin points out, there's a terrific demo here. Silverlight also now supports H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs, which is exceptionally handy for people encoding for a wide variety of platforms.
There's a lot of enhancements that Flash was late to the party on, including SEO improvements (long the bane of such dynamic plug-in media), and multi-touch support. Coupled with some server side enhancements (Ars has a good round up here), this makes Silverlight an easier sell for webheads concerned with search and data-centric sites.
Perhaps the most tantalizing bit are the "out of browser" experiences promised by the 3.0 update. This is a direct shot at Adobe's AIR efforts, and is lovingly detailed here.
Naturally Silverlight works on PC's running Windows and Macs (Intel and PPC, although version 2 and 3 only support Intel). Sorry Linux, still no love there.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsToddJul 9th 2009 4:44PM
In related news...
HTML5 now available for your Flash and Silverlight 3 killing pleasure
rells009Jul 9th 2009 5:27PM
...just as soon as we can get all of the guys making the browsers to get it implemented. I don't expect Microsoft to get around to that for a good long while.
theparticlemanJul 9th 2009 5:36PM
And just as soon as everyone finishes deciding which formats they're going to support.
xsirxxJul 9th 2009 9:08PM
Yea I welcome HTML5, unfortunately they will never agree on a codec.
RichardJul 9th 2009 5:45PM
Does anyone proofread their articles anymore? This is the 4th article today that I have read that has typos/grammatical errors in it.
polobunnyJul 9th 2009 6:49PM
No no no, Smooth Streaming really enables you to was HD video instantly. :P
iGateJul 10th 2009 7:13AM
"allows you to was HD video instantly"
yea i was gonna tell you about that - but he beat me to it.
Saint SeminoleJul 9th 2009 8:23PM
And regular joes like me still have never installed Silverlight because we already had plenty of apps and plug-ins that played video. I just avoid the sites that "require" Silverlight.
xsirxxJul 9th 2009 9:07PM
Well looks like you will be late to the party then, because Silverlight is gaining ground with developers.
Jpoly4Jul 10th 2009 9:16PM
Really??? Developers are using Silverlight. I have worked in the industry for 10 years and no one I know is using it. Actually MLB.com is moving away from it. They made a deal with Adobe because they had problems with the video streaming. Also do you think YouTube will change to Silverlight?? I doubt it. LOL! MS just give up and try and fix your horrible OS.
JimJul 10th 2009 2:12PM
Interesting... I would like to try it, but I don't do M$. They have no credibility with me.
JamusJul 10th 2009 9:03AM
Still no love for content creation also unless you are running Windows. The last time I checked, the only app available for something besides Windows, was for Mac and even it was horribly crippled compared to the Windows version.