Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date

Chapter 8. Adding Sound and Video

Adobe Flash has made a remarkable transition in the past few years. Market penetration of the Flash player (the plug-in) has always been very high, but whenever a new player version came out, it took several months for it to reach a good-size audience. However, this adoption has sped up significantly recently. There may be many reasons for this, but one of the most compelling is that recent Flash versions have acquired much better video support. Given that video sites such as YouTube are extremely popular at the moment, they prompt users to install the latest player to see the content.

Multimedia support is a key feature of many browser plug-ins, and Silverlight clearly does not want to disappoint its users here. For obvious reasons, the supported media formats are biased toward Microsoft’s offerings. Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) files, versions 7 through 9. Also, WMVA and WMVC1, two rather new video formats from Microsoft, are supported. The only external format Silverlight can process is the very popular MP3 audio format.

There is a reason for this bias, however. The plug-in plays content in these formats without the help of any other software or player. So, it is not necessary to have an MP3 player or even Windows Media Player to play supported multimedia content in Silverlight. This applies to both the Windows and Mac platforms.

Silverlight also supports streaming, in the form of either Windows Media ...