First Moonlight 2.0 Preview Out - with Smooth Streaming

Novell has just released the first Moonlight 2.0 Preview, dubbed Moonlight 1.9. It adds a bunch of new Silverlight 2 features, and offers compatibility with many more sites. Near and dear to my heart, it supports Smooth Streaming. Deep Zoom is also working.

The mono team has tons of info, so here’s a link list.

• Miguel de Icaza has a detailed blog post
• Chris Toshok has some great details as well.
• Moonlight 1.9 Release Notes
• The test sites Moonlight targets, with the status of each
• Silverlight/Moonlight development with the Mac OS X MonoDevelop

They’re hard at work finishing Silverlight 2 support, and have already started adding some Silverlight 3 features, including (from Chris’s link above):

• Easing functions for animations, including user-supplied ones.
• SaveFileDialog, a safe way to allow users to save content from Silverlight applications
• MultiScaleImage (the heart of Deep zoom) API additions (e.g. the AllowDownloading property).
• MediaStreamSource now supports PCM audio data, RGBA and YV12 video data.  This along with other extensions makes it very easy to write codecs entirely in managed code, that you can then distribute with your xap.
• WriteableBitmap is supported.

I’m particularly excited abut the Raw AV support being there, as it opens up a whole world of media format extensibility.

Anyway, great stuff guys! I’m looking forward to a final release and being able to have Moonlight and Silverlight compatibility be something that “just works.”