The version number, “2.0,” means that Moonlight is now compatible with all Silverlight 2.0 websites on the net. Although Silverlight 3.0 has already been released, it will take time for it to be fully adopted notes Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza on his blog. With this version of Moonlight, says de Icaza, users will be able to access “most Silverlight content out there today.”

You can download Moonlight as either a Mozilla plugin for Linux systems running on x86 or x86-64 or you can access the Moonlight source code. For more details on the release, check the Beta 1 Release Notes.

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.”

• Moonlight 1.0 officially goes live
• Silverlight is fizzing, not fizzling
• ServerQuest Contest
• Smooth Streaming Architecture
• Three Essential Expression Blend Add-Ins
• Silverlight Metronome
• YDreams demonstrates controlling PhotoSynth with gestures
• 3D Spiral Image Rotation for MIX 09 Challenge
• Sega Master System Cogwheel 8-bit emulator

<-- Episode 5

Miguel de Icaza’s blog has the full details and well worth the read. A few key points:

• This is an implementation of Silverlight 1.0. Thus it has
  • XAML for drawing the user interface
  • Browser JavaScript for application logic (no managed code yet)
  • Media Features
• The codec and file format support is distributed by Microsoft as a binary module that plugs into Moonlight. Users will be prompted to install it the first time they try to play back media. This allows for Microsoft to cover patent license fees associated with the codecs.
• Since we based that module on Silverlight 2 , this includes the VC-1 decoder improvements from Silverlight  2, and WMA 10 Pro.
• Moonlight is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Now the team is moving on to Moonlight 2.0 and Silverlight 2 compatibility, which is currently in pre-alpha. The big work item there is getting the CLR/DLR fully integrated. Once we get that, we’ll have Smooth Streaming working on Linux! As an open source project, they’re welcoming help.

And here’s my favorite Moonlight project I just heard about: Moonshine. It uses Moonlight to emulate the old Windows Media Player OCX embedding model, so that web pages targeting the old player can work in Firefox on Linux. It can also play back local WMV files. Given that VLC hasn’t be able to play back VC-1 content with B-frames, I’m very glad for this.

Screenshot of Moonlight (taken from their page. I still need to get the new SUSE installed; my computers have all been encoding full blast since December).

• Presidential Inauguration in Silverlight and Moonlight
• New Version of Kaxaml with Support for Silverlight 2
• MVVM, WPF UI Design Pattern
• Silverlight Facebook Client Side API
• Deep Linking + Browser History Navigation in Silverlight
• 6 Things I Bet You Didn't Know About Data Binding in WPF
• Surface: The Banking Demo
• BabySmash! + Windows7
• Stars Demo

<-- Episode 2		Episode 4 -->

As I mentioned on Friday, the official streaming feed of Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee will be using Silverlight 2.

However, using managed code in the player leaves out Linux users of the Moonlight 1.0 beta, as well as PowerPC Mac users. We’ve heard a lot of requests to add support for those platforms, and so we teamed up with the Moonlight team at Novell and they’ve created a Silverlight 1.0 version of the player that works great in both Moonlight and PowerPC Macs. Miguel de Icaza has details from his side.

We kicked the project off this afternoon before the event, so pardon us if it’s a little rough. The only significant limitation is that the SL1 player can only do the 500 Kbps stream – lacking managed code, making a manifest XML parser in JavaScript didn’t seem like something we should start testing only nine hours before the event goes live.

But anyway, thanks to Joseph, Larry, Geoff, Rusty and especially Aaron at Novell for pulling this together so quickly and so well, and Mio at iStreamPlanet for making the last minute encoder tweaks to make it Silverlight 1.0 compatible. On the Microsoft side, Brian Goldfarb and Eric Schmidt did a great job making the call and making it happen. Just go to www.pic2009.org in the morning and the updated player should be available around 6 am EST (11 am GMT).

That something like this could come together on such short notice is a testament to the chops and passion of the Moonlight team and the great platform we’re both implementing. I’m glad we got this chance to demonstrate how serious we are about this collaboration (although I wouldn’t have minded starting a day earlier…).

Update: The Silverlight 1.0 compatible player is low live at:

http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/linuxplayer

Note that this player is only for Silverlight 1.0 and doesn't work with Internet Explorer. The Silverlight 2.0 player for Windows or Intel Mac is at:

http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/live

(And yes, that would have been easy to fix, but we're rather out of time!)

Tech Specs

And as I promised earlier, I got the tech details on how the streams are encoded. Note there is manual stream selection in the lower right corner;

Hardware

There are quite a few encoders to handle the different streams, data rates, and to provide failover backups. All systems are quad-core, and use hardware preprocessing.

• Onsite configuration: Dell Precision workstations with Osprey 230 capture cards
• Offsite configuration: Dell 2950 with Digital Rapids capture cards.

Software

The encoders are running Windows XP and use Windows Media Encoder, with my recommended tweaks and registry key settings applied.

Codecs

• Video: Window Media Video 9 Advanced Profile (aka VC-1 Advanced Profile)
• Audio: Windows Media Audio 9.2

The audio was originally going to be WMA 10 Pro for improved efficiency, but we fell back to WMA 9.2 in order to have Silverlight 1.0 compatibility. Fortunately the audio feeds are either mono or might as well be, so we can win some efficiency back by encoding in mono.

300 Kbps streams

• Video: 480x360, 29.97 fps, 259 Kbps
• Audio: 44.1 KHz mono, 32 Kbps

500 Kbps streams

• Video: 480x360, 29.97 fps, 442 Kbps
• Audio: 44.1 KHz mono, 48 Kbps

• Windows 7 beta announced
• Source code for Silverlight controls published
• Live Mesh Awarded Best Technology Innovation/Achievement Crunchie
• Screencast of Silverlight installation on Linux
• Frame Based Sprite Animation in Silverlight
• WPF Tutorial - A Simple Twitter Client
• TANKS - a Silverlight Game with C# and Farseer Physics
• PhotoSuru, an innovative photo-viewing WPF application
• Silverlight Hydrodynamics

Music: Night Light by Reveling_John

Episode 2 -->

And thus, the beta 1 of Moonlight 1.0 is now available. Moonlight 1.0 maps to Silverlight 1.0, so you've got good XAML support. But there's no .NET bytecode support, so logic takes places inside the browser's JavaScript engine. Beta 1 also includes support for the "Microsoft Media Pack" described here. Moonlight will automatically offer to download it the first time you hit a media file. Microsoft covers the patent licensing for the included codecs.

Here's a list of supported sites. I imagine most of my demo projects up on Silverlight Streaming should work, as they're all Silverlight 1.0 compatible at this point. Someone who gets this installed, let me know (my personal lameness documented below).

Ars Technica also has a good article about beta 1. It contains plenty of screen shots and such, which I have once again failed to provide due to my lamentable lack of Linux-fu.

Anyway, huzzah to the Moonlight team. I can't wait for the final release of Moonlight 1.0 and the first beta of Moonlight 2.0.

(Yes I did try to install Ubuntu, but as with every attempt I've made to run Linux in the last five years, I quickly got stymied by video driver issues. While I got basic display working, I was using my backup Barcelona box, which has my beloved but ancient LaCie ElectronBlu 22: CRT monitor and a cheapo 1280x1024 LCD. Out of the box, it wouldn't let me run the main monitor at more than the small displays resolution or (more painfully) refresh rate. I tried to fix it until I got to the "type sudo..." phase. I bumped into Miguel de Icaza himself at an event last week (we had a fun chat about GPU compositing), who tells me that the new OpenSUSE 11.1 has a nice GUI configuration utility that should fix the issue.)

This month, Moonlight will begin offering support for the Microsoft Media Pack 1.0., according to this post on the ISV Developer Community site. Here’s a look at what else can be expected in that November release:

• Support for Microsoft's Media Pack 1.0 for playing back video and audio.
• Silverlight 1.0 compatible engine.
• Scriptable with the browser JavaScript.
• C/C++ based, no managed code.
• Distribution: Linux/x86 and Linux/x86-64.
• Source code releases for any other operating systems

In March 2009, the Moonlight 2.0 Alpha release will include:

To learn more about Moonlight, check out the project homepage or this blog post. You can also see it in action here (video).