Stephen Withers
Friday, 12 September 2008 14:03
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 2
Microsoft's getting with the program: the company has previewed support for H.264 video content in Silverlight. Some may question why it has taken Redmond so long to embrace the video standard.
Silverlight is Microsoft's technology for creating rich Internet applications in competition with Adobe's Flash and related products. The idea is to provide a programming environment that is familiar to Windows developers along with browser plug-ins for Windows, Mac OS X and mobile devices. An open-source implementation called Moonlight is being developed by the Mono team.
The advantage of H.264 is that it provides good quality at relatively low bit rates across a range of image resolutions. It is used by both Blu-ray and the ill-fated HD DVD standards, as a part of DVB-T (terrestrial digital TV) in various countries, in some IPTV systems, and for videoconferencing.
Apple has been selling H.264 videos through the iTunes Store since 2005, and YouTube progressively moved its content to H.264, largely to suit Apple TV, iPhone and iPod touch users.
Adobe added support for H.264 playback to Flash Player in August 2007, having already enhanced its media creation tools with H.264 encoding.
And now Microsoft is set to join the club. The company used the IBC2008 conference to preview support for H.264 video and AAC audio playback in an unspecified future release of Silverlight.
Microsoft will also support H.264 encoding in its Expression content creation tools and its delivery from Windows Server 2008.
What does this mean for broadcasters and content creators? Find out on
page two - along with other Microsoft news from IBC2008.
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