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I was listening to the interview with Miguel De Icaza on NOA Friday and he was discussing Moonlight, the mono implementation of MS Silverlight (their competitor to flash for rich media content). One of the thoughts that crossed my mind was how they were going to implement video. Now I figure that MS would probably embed some way for Silverlight to use wmv and for that matter, wma. There is only one legal implementation for those codecs that I know of - Fluendo. That poses and interesting problem for how Moonlight is going to handle closed codecs should that be the case. Maybe I am off base here with regards to how Silverlight is going to operate. Maybe it will be without such proprietary hooks and work like flv.

Ooh, good question.

Wonder if it will be a new codec entirely. MS has been known to pull that craptastic stunt.

My guess is that because MS fears Linux much more than apple, it will be crippled like a mofo. A lot of codecs come pre-installed/licensed with windows. Thats probably why it is listed as a different product.
The "moon" part of moonlight probably refers to "Let Bill show you linux users his lilly white ass as you try unsuccessfully to visit many silverlight sites."

According to Miguel's blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html MS will be providing binary codec support to moonlight users. SuSE will also be making packages for the major distorbutions in addition to binary dep and rpm's.

I'm a bit confused on wording of this:

icrosoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser (sorry, those are the rules for the Media codecs[1]).

....

[1] Currently Moonlight video support has been prototyped using the fabulous and LGPLed ffmpeg engine for video and audio. We are unable to redistribute this code commercially due to licensing conflicts. Update: This means that individuals that want to use a 100% pure free software setup can do so. We are unable to redistribute this edition though.

Does this mean right now the version of moonlight available makes use of ffmpeg and the "illegal in the us" win32 codecs? If so, will ffmpeg be pulled out of moonlight and be replaced with a native system ustilizing the MS supplied codecs if they are available on the system?

Mono is under a mixed licenses: GPL (C# and tools), LGPL (runtime libraries) and MIT X11 (class libraries). So it's a mixture of both free and opensource sofware (http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing). Moonlight is going to be released as Frees Software giving the user the choice to install proprietary codecs. This sounds like a good thing.

I'm wondering where the catch is though, if there is one.

MS is providing specifications and such to the moonlight development team. Will this come back to bite them in the ass later on down the line? Will MS be able to point to moonlight and possibly mono as infringing on their ip?

Finally, I looked at the supported audio and video formats for Silverlight -Aside from mp3, it's all Windows media formats.

Now drop down to the bottom of the blog post about ogg support:

Update: Some folks are asking whether they could use OGG for the video rendering in Moonlight. Today this is already possible because the media engine we use to prototype is ffmpeg which has support for this. From the standpoint of a desktop developer this might be enough, but for the web, the problem becomes an issue of compatibility with the Microsoft Silverlight implementation.

We will bring up with Microsoft the issue of adding a new codec, but I suspect that since they are pressed to minimize the download size this might be difficult. There are other competing codecs though that people on the Silverlight groups are fairly vocal about and my eclipse our request. If you want official Ogg support from Microsoft, please bring this up on the Silverlight.net forums, Microsoft does listen to user feedback.

Interesting. It seems moonlight will be incumbant on MS to supply the audio and video codec support. They will not be able to add ogg support on their own. That will really criple the GPL version of moonlight, I must say. That's a pretty strict limitation no matter how you look at it.[/url]

dann wrote:Does this mean right now the version of moonlight available makes use of ffmpeg and the "illegal in the us" win32 codecs?

Dann, those codecs are illegal worldwide, because it's just some Windows DLLs that MPlayer and Xine can use because of some stuff they borrowed from Wine. Most of these DLLs are Microsoft's property, and are licensed for use with Windows.

dann wrote:Mono is under a mixed licenses: GPL (C# and tools), LGPL (runtime libraries) and MIT X11 (class libraries). So it's a mixture of both free and opensource sofware (http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing).

Actually all of those are licenses are free software licenses. Two of those licenses (GPL, LGPL) are written by the FSF, and the MIT license is on the FSF's list of free software licenses, you can see for yourself right here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html


Yo Dann, I think you ought to try and get Miguel on the show and grill him with some questions about this.

AFAIK, the win32codecs package isn't required to play Windows Media files anymore. I can play back WMV videos just fine through MPlayer on PPC, which uses the libavcodec through ffmpeg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec

Wally Balljacker wrote:AFAIK, the win32codecs package isn't required to play Windows Media files anymore. I can play back WMV videos just fine through MPlayer on PPC, which uses the libavcodec through ffmpeg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec

I think they were comparing the moonlight codecs to win32codecs in that they may both be just windows libraries using wine components.

Wally Balljacker wrote:AFAIK, the win32codecs package isn't required to play Windows Media files anymore. I can play back WMV videos just fine through MPlayer on PPC, which uses the libavcodec through ffmpeg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec

Indeed so my friend!