Yeh this is a bit old this was before AIR was even released and Silverlight 2.0 details were sketchy. Although, even flash has changed since this time and the new version allos H.264 video, quicktime, mpeg etc not just FLV file formats. Where Silverlight will only play WMV and silverlight encoded video. Both do HD now at 720.

As for widgets, AIR is much better than Silverlight because silverlight has no desktop capability just yet. Also zinc has pretty much been squashed as well as all the other SWF to EXE kits. They still have some use but with the jump to AS3 and AIR out there they will be playing catch up.

We’ll see how it plays out but yes I definitely need to update the angle on this post.

Silverlight’s lack of FLV support is not a problem. FLV is not a “standard” it’s a wrapper and it only supports 2 proprietary codecs. Have you ever tried to play an FLV in any player other than a pre-build flash one?

Silverlight supports VC-1 which is an actual published standard that anyone can write their own version of and have it be compatible. It also supports WMV – which is proprietary but Microsoft puts out the encoder for free so anyone can make WMV. The same cannot be easily done for FLV (except for ffmpeg and it’s wrappers).

Ultimately none of this matters because if you provide the app you can specify the video format and you would likely provide a transcoding service for any video that was in the wrong format – so that is just NOT really a problem.

Also – I’m not sure what the runtime size was like in April of 07, but it is definitely not an issue today.

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