Inaugural Kudos to Microsoft and Novell

This is a nice effort on the part of folks at Microsoft and Novell.  They managed to roll out a Silverlight/Moonlight player for Linux and PowerPC Macs.   The official streaming feed of Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee will be using Silverlight 2.

I’ve installed the plugins in Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3 and while I get a picture its more like a slideshow than a streaming video.  I don’t know if thats by design, or if its a problem.  The new player can only stream the 500Kbps stream so it may be a bandwidth thing right now.

I’d love to see how much of the wired (non-satellite) Internet capacity in Washington DC is in use today between 11:00am and 2:00pm.

Even if it does not play as well as one could hope, the folks behind this get an A for effort.

Obama Inauguration on Linux and PowerPC Macs! Plus codec details | Ben Waggoner

We kicked the project off this afternoon before the event, so pardon us if it’s a little rough. The only significant limitation is that the SL1 player can only do the 500 Kbps stream – lacking managed code, making a manifest XML parser in JavaScript didn’t seem like something we should start testing only nine hours before the event goes live.

But anyway, thanks to Joseph, Larry, Geoff, Rusty and especially Aaron at Novell for pulling this together so quickly and so well, and Mio at iStreamPlanet for making the last minute encoder tweaks to make it Silverlight 1.0 compatible. On the Microsoft side, Brian Goldfarb and Eric Schmidt did a great job making the call and making it happen. Just go to www.pic2009.org in the morning and the updated player should be available around 6 am EST (11 am GMT).

That something like this could come together on such short notice is a testament to the chops and passion of the Moonlight team and the great platform we’re both implementing. I’m glad we got this chance to demonstrate how serious we are about this collaboration (although I wouldn’t have minded starting a day earlier…).

Update: The Silverlight 1.0 compatible player is low live at:  http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/linuxplayer

Note that this player is only for Silverlight 1.0 and doesn’t work with Internet Explorer. The Silverlight 2.0 player for Windows or Intel Mac is at: http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/live