On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:39 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is clever-ish:
http://www.atoker.com/blog/2010/02/04/html5-theora-video-codec-for-silverlig...
He says there that this will Just Work on ~40% of Windows boxes. Not bad.
Cortado works wherever Java is installed, which is probably quite a lot more machines -- including Safari on Mac, for instance. If we used anything non-Java, it would surely be Flash, which has much greater penetration than Silverlight on all platforms.
Yes, Cortado works in more places but there is no reason that BOTH can't be used, extending support to places with silverlight but without Java.
Additionally, although cortado will work the Java ~1.1 VM that came with Navigator 4... it's rather slow except in the latest JVMs. I expect that a lot of systems with silverlight are not running an especially modern JVM.
Flash isn't something in the running because you still need to be using encumbered media formats to use it... unless you're only playing audio: There are several independent Vorbis implementations for the flash virtual machine, no video codecs yet, and sadly the flash architecture is no where near as nice as the silverlight one for remote-loaded codecs so you have to completely reinvent all the media infrastructure.