Microsoft has released Silverlight 3 to the web a day earlier than expected. You can go ahead and grab Silverlight 3 RTW build 3.0.40624.0 (4.69MB) from Microsoft.com/Silverlight. Version 3 supports Windows Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3/4. In addition, the Silverlight 3 SDK (9.5MB) and the Silverlight 3 Tools (32.2MB) have been posted on the Microsoft Download Center. (arstechnica)
As Silverlight versions go it is quite impressive and pretty much a complete solution now including desktop save support and full set of tools for RIA development (early versions were only Javascript or had limited controls libraries).
Granted there are lots of years of gain that Flash has on Silverlight but the path that Silverlight it following leads right to Flash. Hopefully this will lead to more innovation on both sides (they might need it with Google Wave pushing html5 <canvas>).
One very nice element of Silverlight since it has been released at verison 1.0 is the HD video support. It has gotten better with each release. This release has smooth streaming support that is pretty impressive for web video.
Roy Schestowitz plays the flip side and calls this a ’silver-lie’ released and has lots to say about the Silverlight 3 release and even using Big Buck Bunny to demo it. He states a true fact that up til now lots of companies have abandoned Silverlight in favor of Flash (mlb, nyt etc). It is still used at Netflix but that has an XBOX deal to play Netflixon xbox360.
Flash didn’t really get good until version 4. Typically software is a real version at version 3, that is when most software has the goals and ambitions of 1.0 fully complete and integrated. We shall see how things play out but I still think Silverlight has a long way to go in winning over developers, myself included, but competition is never a bad thing when you are wanting to see innovation.
Making games that integrate content from the web is especially required these days. It is a difficult thing to do within the 3d render because of all the plugins, styling etc that needs to be rendered on a 3d surface. Well Torque3D has a killer feature in that it supports entirely full features browser render on a 3d surface. So now you can integrate html content, flash video etc in your game easily.
You can play content in flash player content easily and have stripped down html but it is limited, you can play videos and have content in Unity3d but it is limited, even larger engines like Unreal 3 have difficulty handling flash and html content. If this is a good implementation Torque3D has a killer feature on their hands! Flash is commonly used as user interface elements and content within games but it can be challenging. This is pretty exciting if it works as advertised. Think of how cool all the little consoles, mini-games and controls in 3d games could be in flash easily.
Augmented reality is a very cool technology. It is the star wars holograms that we always want, it is playing a game that maps out the physical world mixed with virtual assets, it is straight up cool.
The FLARToolKit is doing some of this cool in Flash. This little toolkit is pretty sweet mapping points and sets of points to patterns, colors or other visual queues that technology can latch onto. Combine this with a webcam and you have some pretty cool AR.
The demo shows great examples of the player with just the window canvas (chromeless) from both javascript and inside of flash.
The project is hosted on Google Code [youtubechromelesswrapper-as3]
Looks like they maybe had a contribution for this, so do it where you can.
This is something we’ve been wanting to provide for a while, and the YouTube API team greatly appreciates the work of developer Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block for making it happen. Thanks Matthew!
Loads but does not automatically play video based on specified id.
player.clearVideo():void
Clears currently cued/loaded video.
player.setSize(w:Number, h:Number):void
Sets the size of YouTubePlayer instance.
player.play():void
Plays the currently cued/loaded video.
player.pause():void
Pauses the currently cued/loaded video.
player.stop():void
Stops the currently cued/loaded video.
player.seekTo(seconds:Number):void
Seeks to specified time within the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getPlayerState():String
Returns the current state of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getBytesLoaded():Number
Returns the value of current bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getBytesTotal():Number
Returns the value of total bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getCurrentTime():Number
Returns the current position in time of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getDuration():Number
Returns the current duration of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getStartBytes():Number
Returns the start bytes of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.setVolume(newVolume:Number):void
Sets the volume of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getVolume():Number
Returns the current volume of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.mute():void
Stores the current volume and changes the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to 0.
player.unmute():void
Returns the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to the last stored value when muted.
player.getEmbedCode():String
Returns the current YouTube embed code of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getVideoUrl():String
Returns the current YouTube video url of the currently cued/loaded video.
Events
YouTubeLoaderEvent.LOADED
Fired once the Chromeless Player has successfully completed loading and is ready to accept operations calls.
YouTubeLoaderEvent.STATE_CHANGE
Fired whenever the player’s state changes. The YouTubeLoader class translates the JavaScript API numbers to their related string values, the YouTubeLoaderEvent class stores the current event in a variable called state. Possible values are unstarted, ended, playing, paused, buffering, video cued. When the SWF is first loaded, it will broadcast an unstarted event. When the video is cued and ready to play, it will broadcast a video cued event.
YouTubeLoaderEvent.IO_ERROR
Fired when an error in the player occurs. There are two error codes possible: 100 is broadcasted when the video requested is not found. This occurs when a video has been removed (for any reason), or it has been marked as private. 101 is broadcasted when the video requested does not allow playback in the embedded players.
haXe, one of the coolest and most versatile languages and platforms of today just released something to add to the already amazing feature set of haXe. Nicolas Cannasse has posted about releasing haXe Video 1.0. I have been engulfed by Red5 for a few weeks and this could not have come at a better time for fun.
haxeVideo is an opensource video streaming server entirely written in haXe.
Features of haXe Video 1.0:
FLV streaming using RTMP protocol
Webcam and Microphone recording to FLV file
Live streaming for web conferencing
light and fast scalable server
only 50 KB of server source code : modify whatever you need !
Sandy 3.0 was released today. To go along with that a RedSandy (Red5 and sandy demo) has also been released. Sandy is the original 3d flash engine that was around before Papervision3D and Away3D and all the others. Sandy3d is an excellent library and it has many features that others do not have well particularly in the easier control of objects and importing all types of files such as ASE, WRL and 3ds in addition to COLLADA which other 3d engines like PV3d and Away3d support although it has been slower in the past 3.0 may change that.
Sandy 3D engine main features are :
Flash player 7 to 9 compatibility.
Both MTASC and Macromedia compilers compliant for AS2 and Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder for AS3 versions.
Several 3D primitives, allowing fast and parameterized object creation without any 3D modelisation knowledge.
Advanced and easy object management allowing some fantastic possibilities during your creations (scaling, rotation, translation, tween, etc.)
Advanced camera management ( rotation, motion on linear or bezier-curve path, movements, etc.)
Complex object loading thanks to the .ASE and .WRL files parser , but also Collada and 3DS files for AS3, (files generated by several 3D object modeling packages such as 3D Studio Max or Blender)
Material system to easily change your objects appearance. Several material are available allowing to create transparent faces, bitmap texture and video texture as webcam video stream.
Managment of Flash filters bringing some very nice visual effects
The cool and probably most interesting part is Sandy combined with Red5 to create multi-user environments in 3d for flash. There have been experiments with this and many attempts at this and is being done but an open source kit that does this is very helpful and these are two great flash toolkits in Sandy and Red5.
Fast performance is needed for good video combined with interactivity especially. Quickly comparing AS2 to AS3 shows that AS3 and the AVM2 virtual machine in Flash9 is much faster. If you are combining Flash and video especially when it is time to go HD, you will need performance.
Compare AS2 to AS3 rendering: AS2 & AS3 Note the as2 item only has 10000 pixel operations, the as3 item has 50,000 and is considerably more usable, in fact the AS2 version isn’t usable since it is slow. [source] This is a good test because it checks the movement of every pixel on the screen which leads me to video performance.
Recently Silverlight came out last week officially on Wednesday, really the 1.0 release is just a video and javascript release but when you view the videos below you will see that they have a short coup de tat on Flash video at the moment in terms of HD quality video.
Silverlight also has been pushing TV on the internet. See these samples that are actual TV on web pages already using Silverlight.
Flash video is cool and you can do great fun things like neave.tv (flash and high definition FLV video in flash9 with AS3 and on occasion AS2 if it is just video with full screen flash but when you are talking TV and movie quality, it is still up for grabs but both are looking good especially Silverlight and that Halo 3 video.
Tinic Uro reports the beta player of flash that has HD now. Currently the FLV format is the web leader (you tube, Google video) but is not as good quality as Silverlight until they update to H.264 at least in terms of standards video. This is probably 6 months off?
Video literally changed in the internet in the last two weeks with the Flash announcements and Silverlight launching. I am surprised at Silverlight’s adoption rate and partnerships so far with the 1.0 offering which lacks many programming tools, but I see why on the video front why they did it. When 1.1 comes out it has all the programmer toys, and it will attract a lot of attention I think. It is all about performance and HD video right now.
Yes yes… Quicktime has done HD/H.264 video for a while but Quicktime is just a video format really, it will be able to be used in the new flash video as well as other formats but it doesn’t have the interactive platform behind it like Flash and Silverlight have.
The difference is the choice of format and standards. Silverlight with VC-1 and Flash going to H.264 codec. They are largely competing standards that are both “HD”.
The good news is we have competition to bring really high quality video to the web, the mashups with HD video in interactive games, demos, advertising etc will be very fun.
Tinic Uro who works on the Flash player made some amazing announcements about the new beta flash player. Video is getting a major upgrade to the already pwning FLV format on the web, they are moving away from that however towards a H.264 standard format (can you say HD movies on your PC in Flash?). Silverlight (Windows Media VC-9), Quicktime and other formats were looking superior to FLV quality (although noone can beat the file size) but this has changed the game completely.
The people running the Flash product are just answering the calls of the market very effectively.
Some tidbits of what is possible with the new H.264 standard video in Flash:
Playing content of other formats inside of Flash without worrying about loading another player or plug-in. (MPEG player or Quicktime movies for instance)
Play HD video on your PC in Flash with support from video card manufacturers in the works.
Play AAC SBR data instead of MP3, 5.1 channel surround sound.
Use open source only tools for your complete video pipeline.
The state of open source flash players is pretty lagging, I wonder if Adobe would ever help that along i.e. Microsoft with Moonlight. do it! 2 days ago
Uh oh IE9, #html5 within, will they bring html5 to market being the last browser? Will they mess it up? How long will it take to be 90+%? 2 days ago
RT @waxpraxis: Love the term "incidental complexity" - complexity not inherent to a problem, but from the way the solution is derived. 3 days ago
boo! iMac having hard drive issues only 2 weeks after upgrading to snow leopard, hopefully DiskWarrior can save it. pi day has been tainted. 4 days ago
Alice in Wonderland was pretty good, great visuals, pretty decent dose of Burton. 6 days ago
OpenGL 4.0 released, in a couple years we will have opengl 4 enabled cards w tessellation... http://bit.ly/cggF3f - puts it on par with DX11 1 week ago
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