Few points: · Let’s agree to disagree, as clearly we’re at opposite ends on this one ☺
· It looks pretty good? Any indication as to what you’re about to do with it or is this just what you’ve read from first impressions off their initial press releases? (curious to see how well you’ve digested the entire story around this). · There’s a lot more to just playing video, folks tend to want to add other elements and factors to the video story online, given advertising + video seems to be a hot topic online at the moment. Flash whilst having a fairly ubiquitous story online, still has had troubles with low quality video mixed with reduced ‘stickiness’ online. During the Olympics, when the world was craving for online video, the best day Flash had was 3mins+ per session on average. We had 26mins+ on average (http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog/archive/2008/10/30/the-olympic-numbers-are-in.aspx). Given they are reacting to Microsoft Silverlight (by their own admission) and going by their history in this space whilst adding the TCO etc, like I said, the Jury is still out on what exactly this really means and how well Flash 10 is likely to perform overall. · Partnerships with both CDN’s and the “Cloud” are something that is likely to be the next wave of influence around online video, not to mention the strong trends towards Advertising and TV networks looking to secure their assets online to prevent piracy – DRM (hate it or love it). There is more to this story than just having a bit more performance. How do you send video to the new feature, how does one keep track of the bandwidth etc.. How does it play well with other features within the runtime, how easily are things configured to ensure it plays well (eg seen the Amazon + Flash Media server debacle?) · Silverlight offers both VC-1 today, and we’ve announced we’re going to support H.264 going forward, this will put the runtime in a favorable position to allow companies both options. Furthermore, Windows Media Server 2008 and Smooth Streaming are on the horizons as well are offered at a significantly lower price. Expression Media Encoder also provides hardware encoding as well. Point is, we’re making strong bets in both the server, client and cloud to ensure video kick starts to the next wave. We’re not playing the reactive game, it’s proactive and furthermore offering free HD hosting via silverlight.live.com is also part of our approach – so yeah, I think Silverlight is not only the real deal but the cheapest but without a reduction in quality. · If flash is your cup of tea, that’s perfectly fine. I’m not going to think ill of folks adopting Flash, as it’s really comes down to what problems you’re trying to solve, how much investment your about to unload and where you think it will take you down the road. If Flash offers an edge over Silverlight, then my only query is – “tell me what we missed, so I can ensure the next releases cover it..” HTH. Scott. P.S If you prefer to debate offline happy to do so, just conscious of peoples inbox and I don’t see this going anywhere productive is all? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Connors Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 1:44 AM To: listserver@ozsilverlight.com Subject: Re: [OzSilverlight] RE: Hardware accelerated video? Scott, You probably think I'm yanking your chain and I know this is an SL list but seriously "I wouldn't be discouraged by Flash 10's new toys as in the end..Flash is still Flash :D" isn't really a good way to advocate a platform. Props where props are due - Flash 10 does look pretty good. Other replies inline... On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Scott Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: Never stated hardware acceleration was a bad thing? You asked or assumed I implied that but I thought I rejected that and answered your question that it has to do with implementation. So to clarify what are the parts of the Adobe implementation that are bad that make you think the jury is out? As for hardware acceleration in the runtime, in what way is that going to be beneficial overall (i.e. what are you expecting to see or view in this case?). I dunno - I'd be expecting to see all of the normal sorts of eye candy enabled by using dedicated hardware: 1. High quality filtering and resampling - not computationally feasible in software 2. Alpha transparency of video - not computationally feasible in software 3. Transformation of video while playing - not computationally feasible in software 4. 3D with trilinear filtering so you can read text that has come out of the other end of the rendering pipeline. NFI if Flash 10 does that (probably not) but either way you're never going to do it in software. etc Cost has to do with Streaming not so much the client viewing, all those bytes add up and someone has to pay the bill, especially with CDN folks ☺ What bearing does the hardware acceleration model on the client have on the kbps of a video stream it is downloading? Pre-computation? Could you elaborate on what you mean there? I probably used a really poor example here that will confuse the conversation - but say I open a massive image in PS11/CS4. You can (relatively) smoothly zoom into it to your hearts content in real time because the scaling is retargetted to hardware. In that case their use of hardware acceleration (while not at all relevant to the discussion at hand) appears to be very good. I'd presume that if they can enable scenarios like that in an app as old and as complex as PS that they'd do a relatively good job of using it in a client runtime. Note: I am not saying that downloading a massive image and processing it on the client is a substitute for DeepZoom ... I just used that as an app that does something similar (hence I said bad example). The point of pre-computation is that when SL is displaying a Deep Zoom image it is only really working with screen resolution or something pretty close. I would be curious to know how it would go, performance wise, with a 30 meg source image for example. I won't enter the debate around Sony vs. Samsung, LOL. Okay ... but you're the one who brought up the analogy. it's more towards the analogy than the depth of which two brands approach consumers in which ways. The fact here in the US, is that you walk into any best buy store, look at the TV's on full view and the decision comparisons around which to buy typically live in and around price, chrome presentation and warranties. It's extremely hard to spot the difference between each HD TV on display, there are certain tricks applied – like playing Finding Nemo with various tweeks to color profiles to give a "brighter vs. darker" visual queue that somehow one trumps the other. So meh :0 What was the point of your analogy? Are you saying that Flash is all tricks but SL is the real deal? Or that they're all the same and you can't tell? I don't understand? -- David Connors ([EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) Software Engineer Codify Pty Ltd - www.codify.com<http://www.codify.com> Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 189 363 Address Info: http://www.codify.com/contact ;4��!ʦ欲y蚘bXǧuƠyڭ颲ܢ欲y-뮮7Oyֲzv稘fjo,0·v'
