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iPhone & HTML5 bring "streaming Silverlight content" to Linux
On the server, links to those short .ts H.264-files are collected in an M3U8 file, which basically is a playlist for videos. Playing the playlist recreates the original video. Devices like the iPhone can play these playlists. But Linux already can play the separate parts: You can test their showcase example here. Note this will only play the first file in the playlist. This solution will be enabled server side, if the content provider chooses so. I think they will, because it's currently the only way to make the content available for the iPhone. This content will be embedded using the HMTL5 video tag, Microsoft proposes. If so, it would be rather trivial to make an FF-extension that would play those m3u8 playlist-files using mplayer, or maybe mplayer or vlc will support this file format. Funny thing to mention is they chose the Big Buck Bunny video to showcase their solution, a movie made using Linux and Free Software excusively. Anyway, I'm glad because this probably means to watch Silverlight-videos from broadcasting companies in my country I may not need to install Moonlight or Mono. And in contrary to Flash, I'm able to watch this video in full screen (scaling works!) without crashing Firefox. What do you think? Let us know and post a reply to this story if you wish. For now, happy watching - a Free Software movie provided to you by Microsoft! Update 27-11-09 / 0:20 CET: I accidentally assumed it was MPEG2, but it turns out to be H.264, so I corrected it. Someone on the Dutch forum Tweakers.net helped me a bit, as I'm not that familiar with media streaming: The video is cut in chunks for different bitrates. Then, depending on the available bandwith and if and how well the chunks arrive, the client can choose the best bitrate to download the next chunks. Especially for slow connections, this provides great opportunities, and this might be the reason to use Silverlight instead of 'plain old streaming'. |
Comments (9)
Cool thing is, Youtube on fullscreen _does_ work in Opera OTOH. I can live with it, though it would be great if it is fixed.
H.264 however seems to be a different beast, it scales wonderfully.
This would be a big deal for me if I could watch netflix on my main machine. I've been watching them on my work laptop on XP and would prefer to use Linux.
Slackware64 here, with a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 on AMD64 X2 2.5 GHz. Hulu causes no stress on my system.
Have you configured xorg.conf to use a real chip driver, instead of the brain-dead "VESA Framebuffer" default?
I have, and I get so much stress on my system that I have to set Flash quality to low in order to make Hulu acceptable viewing at 480p.
The sad thing here, is that the version intended for Linux is dog-slow due to the awful native Flash plugin, so I find it works better to just run the Windows exe via WINE.
Sad, innit?
Watching some movies on the hard disk also use up a lot of cpu (80 %) so maybe the machine is a bit slow by today's standards.
Linux harpo 2.6.27.7-smp #2 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:32:43 CST 2008 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
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I've never had the problem you describe. Mind you the quality of every Youtube Video I've scalle to full screen is terrible. On the other hand, we have ABC (That's Australian Broadcasting Commission) with iView, it's Flash based streaming content (you get reruns all the recent TV ABC has aired, so I can catch up on Doctor Who, which we can't get on our TV, as it can only get ABC1) . I watch it quite a bit. The quality is excellent even at full screen on a 1680 by 1050 22 inch Monitor, and definitely no FF crashes.