On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 4:58 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 5 February 2010 21:53, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
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.
The thirty-second startup time of Java for Cortado makes it unusable, in my experience. Here's to Firefox 3.5.
Geesh. What JVM is this? I just stop-watched it here on http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/cortest/cortest1.html and timed a bit over 3 seconds... fresh browser reload, no prior java applets run, random 1.6ghz x86_64 laptop, and whatever JVM fedora 12 shipped with.
But yes, I'd hope and expect the silverlight stuff to load faster.
Indeed. What's the performance of the Flash ActiveScript Theora decoder like? Horrible, or just bad?
I'm guessing you meant Vorbis, as there is no Theora port. I've not benchmarked it, but it's supposedly a "significant multiple of realtime", but I think significant is something like 10x, which doesn't bode well for a video codec implementation.
The testing I did with the C->flash compiler on another audio codec convinced me that it could be made to work... though the performance may not ultimately be satisfactory. (e.g. it may only work acceptably on fast computers, at low resolutions, etc). Although the flash vm might be a lot faster by the time its done. I think it is somewhat moot to speculate on it when it doesn't exist and, as far as I know, no one is actively working on it.
In other news, There is some progress being made on an installable video native code tag for IE. (http://cristianadam.blogspot.com/2010/01/ie-tag.html there should be some more news on this in a few days)
On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Providing support for Silverlight means that it needs to be tested tp ensure that the support remains stable. Silverlight does not really add value as far as I understand it. It competes with more open standards so reasons can be easily found not to support it. We have to invest in supporting Silverlight, the question is, how does it help us, our readers.
We have a reputation that we support open standards ... so how open is Silverlight ?
David's post isn't about "supporting silverlight" it's about (ab)using it to shim in support for open formats for IE users.
The current video infrastructure supports a half dozen different modes of playback, maintaining one more would be work, but I think it would have a decent value especially compared to some of the ones already there (VLC plugin? oy)
As far as openness goes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell_Moonlight
But I think it's quite reasonable to have different expectations for a technology used as an openness shim. For example, using flash normally has the effect of promoting a proprietary-web but if you use flash only as a <canvas> replacement for IE users it has a neutral or the opposite long term effect.
To the best of my ability to tell, Silverlight is in a much stronger openness position than Flash is, for whatever thats worth. Microsoft has been rather giving and inclusive in this particular bid for world domination. ;)