That ensures that picture quality doesn’t degrade, Key said. Depending on bandwidth, videos start playing either immediately or after a few seconds of caching. Silverlight can play video at 720P high-definition quality - the same 720-line resolution used by DVDs. Not only is Silverlight more convenient than conventional video players such as QuickTime, RealPlayer or Microsoft’s own Windows Media Player, said Microsoft, it may also offer video quality equal or superior to those fuller-fledged offerings. From that experience, Key said, he understands the technical needs of the creative community as well as how to position Silverlight and Expression in a way that "stokes their passion as storytellers." Key is also a former video editor and animator at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic whose feature film credits include Star Wars and Big Love. Before joining Microsoft several years ago, Key was a senior manager at Macromedia Inc., where he helped oversee Flash. Key has some credibility to back up what on the surface sounds like unwarranted cockiness. But Silverlight offers "better video quality than Flash," while the Expression tools will be "cheaper, faster and better" than Adobe’s offerings, he claimed. So congratulations, Microsoft: You've managed to bring a well-equpped four-core CPU to its knees with a simple web browser plugin.Flash has "some video capabilities, and some success in that market," Key said. The only plus to this is that killing the Silverlight plugin didn't bring Safari down too, since it's a separate process. It had also hung, and of course hung Safari with it, plus increased Safari's real memory allocation by about 100MB to boot. And it apparently wanted more, because the system was busy paging everything it could to disk. Activity Monitor reveals why: Silverlight is using 1.3 Gigabytes of RAM. Then I realize that the entire computer-a brand-new 17" MBP with 4GB RAM and not that much open-has slowed to a crawl. I figured I'd check out Bing's streetview equivalent no streetview of my town, so I switched to a city and browsed around.Īfter a couple of minutes, Safari starts beachballing. Well, yesterday I discovered on Bing's maps, the aerial photos of my town are WAY better than Google's (Arcata, CA Google's are almost entirely clouds over town, while the surrounding fields and forest are clear). Silverlight was in the running when I discovered during said Olympics that if you left a window with a Silverlight video in it minimized it would write a steady stream of errors to the console, and it completely filled the boot drive on my HT Mini overnight-the only time my Mini has EVER crashed when it wasn't running Windows in a VM. Well, I should have known that there was only one company capable of out-doing Adobe when it came to harmful software, and it's all to perfect that it would be with the only competing technology for Flash (apart from HTML5, if that counts). Installing ClickToFlash was the single biggest improvement in the day-to-day websurfing experience with my Mac that I have ever made. I hated it LONG before Apple started their anti-Flash campaign, because it routinely pegged the processors on my MBP, ran dog-slow, crashed and brought Safari down with it, or all of the above. I haven't had much opportunity to use Silverlight since the Olympics, but I just had an amusing experience with it that I thought I'd mention.īackground: I am not a fan of Flash.
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