If I start hearing more about Silverlight I’ll probably start looking for a conversion tool and/or just buy it outright and offer that as an additional option. I have given up on my Apple II formats however.

From the viewpoint of a video producer, albeit new, when I hear 11 files vs. 3, I get worried. That’s more opportunity for things to go wrong.

If that issue is being fixed in the next version, that will help. But when it comes to trying something new, as they saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

It will take a lot to push me, and I am afraid a lot of other video producers, away from flash unless there is a compelling reason to do so.

Just my opinion.

I’ll let the people who were working on the networking issues pre-launch know thier hard work paid off . Needless to say, this is the biggest streaming video project in history, so there’s a whole lot of work going in with CDNs to be able to deliver a huge number of live streams.

Thanks for the comment…it’s encouraging to know that MS does pay attention to it’s users.

On your first question, I compared by playing the video back in Silverlight. I’ve added a picture to the post showing a screen shot of the A/B Compare in Expression Encoder. I know it’s a photo, but the difference between the final rendered videos is the same.

On the buffering issues, it was happening with nearly every video I tried to watch on 8-5-2008 around 9:00PM EST. It was even happening on the pre-rolls. Today, the buffering problems are gone (I’ve updated the post to reflect this). By the way, I’m on a premium cable connection at near T1 speed.

However, one strange thing did occur today. Under “Videos”…”NBC Encore”…I tried watching “Chat with Nastia Liukin”. The screen was black as pre-roll audio for an Intel ad played…while simultaneously, I could hear audio from the interview. Once the pre-roll audio finished, the video for the interview appeared.

Thanks for the clarification on the remaining points. I agree, the number of files going up to the server is not a big issue (most are only around 1k in size)…but I pointed it out because I know prolific video content producers are sensitive to those things.

Dave

I’m Ben Waggoner, video nerd on the Silverlight team.

When you compared the Flash and WMV videos, did you play it back in Windows Media Player or Silverlight? If you compare playback in Flash to Silverlight, you should get the exact same contrast from the same video source, unless there was some sort of big in the Flix encoder that caused it to exaggerate the contrast.

Also, did you actually see buffering messages in the Silverlight Olympics player? If so, I’d love to hear the details (what event? Live or on-demand?) so we could take a look at it.

In particular, the on-demand “Encore” content uses some new delivery techniques and should never result in a buffering message, as it switches bitrates dynamically.

A couple of minor points:
I should point out that Windows isn’t bundled with Silverlight by default. It is preinstalled by some vendors (including HP IIRC). In April we said we were seeing over 1.5 million installs a day of Silverlight, so our ubiquity is growing quickly.

In terms of the number of files that go up on a server, I don’t know if that’s a big issue (the player files can be used once per site, so you only need one additional file per video file). But in Silverlight 2, we support the .xap packaging format so all the player assets can be in a single file if desired. Keeping at least the XAML (XML markup that describes the user interface) as individual files makes for very easy searching, and allows for embedded comments etcetera.