Sean Alexander

Finally coming up for air now after 10 hours of press briefings for nearly three days, I can finally talk more here about Silverlight:

Top 10 Questions About Silverlight and Media

1. What media formats do you support?
   A: WMV7,8, 9/SMPTE VC-1, WMA, MP3
2. What is SMPTE VC-1?
   A: WMV9 – now an open standard recognzied by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and shipping in all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives.
3. Will Silverlight work with my current Windows Media?
   A: Yes, it most definitely will work with your existing Windows Media
4. What do I have to do to add Silverlight to my site? For Mac and Windows playback?
   A: Once the beta ships in two weeks, all you’ll have to do is drop a little .js and XML into your page and away you go.
5. Can additional formats be added for playback?
   A: No, part of the appeal of Silverlight is the small package size- 1MB, includes everything it needs for video and audio, animation, graphics and AJAX-based programmability to boot!
6. What companies are supporting Silverlight?
   A: Major League Baseball, Brightcove, NetFlix, Frog Design, AvenueA/Razorfish, Akamai, and many others are among the names announced.
7. How easy the install really going to be?
   A: How does 3 clicks sound for XP users? Vista users have one more click by default due to the user account feature. Web pages can be wired up to do in-line install and auto-refresh after you’re done.
8. Can you really do 720p HD video? What 3D video card do I need?
   A: Definitely. About a 3ghz P4 class processor will work, regardless of video card. We’ve done some really neat processor optimizations. All the demos shown in the booth at NAB were run off a mid-range laptop.
9. Why does resizing/scaling of apps “snap” differently in Safari/FireFox/IE?
   A: It all depends upon the way the browser renders. I won’t make any qualitative comment as your mileage may vary.
10. Will Silverlight work with my existing web server? What about live streaming?
    A: For on-demand, yes! Run it on Darwin, Apache, whatever you’re running. Of course, you’ll get a few added benefits with Windows Media streaming- reduced bandwidth costs, faster seeking, etc.
11. Where can I learn more?
    A: Right now you can learn more at www.microsoft.com/silverlight. The community site will go live at www.silverlight.net. The Beta “Cruise” starts on April 30th.