This Week on C9: Project Natal, Qex for SQL, and Bing for Devs

The Discussion

• 

  The image is still messed up in the Silverlight player for me. It only fills the top 3/4th, with the controls below it, and a black bar below that.

• 

  Weird, it works on my machine

  I tried IE8 and FF 3 and I'm not seeing anything abnormal.

• 

  I have the same problem.

  Chrome on Win 7.

• 

  You mean like this?   I assume it's because the video is now 16:9, but the silverlight player is 4:3.

  

   

  I'm not really much of a gamer but an still really intreasted in Natal, really want the media center support, and here's hopping it get support into windows 7 multi-touch and gestures API.

• 

  Here's what I see in IE8/FF3, notice the player is resized automagically to 16:9.

  

  As to the other point, yes, I'm sure folks will find a way to enable it for Windows, like Brian Peek did for us for the Wiimote Coding4Fun wrapper

  But yes, I'm definitely excited for all of the possibilities with this - voice commands, body tracking, gestures, etc.

• 

  That's what it's like until you start playing the video.

  Anyway, I have to download all the channel9 videos because the streaming is always stalling for some reason. I guess the downloads come from another server because they come down nice'n'fast.

• 

  It looks fine until you start playing the video then you get a 16:9 video playing at the top of a 4:3 black box.

• 

  Got it, yeah, I'm seeing the same thing, I assumed the issue was rendering, but yeah, it's just that the video is 16:9 in a 4:3 player. It looks a lot better just watching/downloading in Windows Media Player/VLC/Your-favorite-player.

  @rhm - The streaming file and the download are also coming from the same location so I don't know why streaming would be slower.

• 

  Maybe the Silverlight player could be updated to 'letterbox' widescreen videos, instead of placing them at the top. Center it vertically, so that it has even black bars on the top and bottom, and then place the controls at the bottom of the player instead of at the bottom of the video.

  Or just autoresize the entire player, of course.

• 

  Yup, if it centered vertically instead of aligning to the top and the controls would stick to the bottom of the box it would look much better.

• 

  check out the official natal speculation thread on c9   http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/472182-Project-Natal--Windows/

  here's hoping for a gooing deep episode on natal [maybe i should'nt hold my breath though]

• 

  In the "Adam Kinney - Motion Capture viewer in Silverlight" section of the "This Week on Channel 9" video, it was mentioned that Nikola used the new 3D features of Silverlight 3.0 to create his Motion Capture Viewer.  That is not the case.  Nikola's Motion Capture Viewer only requires Silverlight 2.0.  Nikola coded the point, vector, matrix, quaternion, etc. classes needed for the quick software rendering of those stick figures (all of which is provided in his Silverlight 2.0 source code) ... and all easily handled by the Silverlight 2.0 player.

  Very Respectfully,
  Joshua Burkholder

   

• 

  That would be awesome.  It would be nice if all video was done in 16x9.

• 

  Doh! Sorry about that, neither of us caught that, apologies. I'm guessing we goofed since Silverlight 3 is getting perspective 3D support we just said that

• 

  Thanks for the explanation. I was curious because I've looked at the documentation for silverlight 3 and I haven't yet found any of the 3d features people on channel9 keep talking about. All I've found is the ability to set a perspective (non-affine) transform on an image. So you can do 'coverflow' with it, but nothing really useful.

• 

  Useful + 3D really depends on the scenario

  One quick note is that you can use this with any controls. Scott Guthrie demonstrated this in his MIX09 keynote showing how to render a data entry form using perspective 3D. Pete Brown has a similar demo showing SL 3's 3D support for a data entry form (with code).