[Mono-dev] Streaming with Moonlight/Silverlight vs Flash

[Jeffrey Stedfast]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 12:31 +0200, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I am about to choose the technology that will be used during the next
> two years to build the ESOF2010 web site (if you're curious about ESOF
> just check this year website, http://www.esof2008.org/). The project for
> 2010 includes a lot of streaming using preferably open protocols and
> open source software (mandatory on the servers, the client code should
> work at least on Windows and Linux and may use proprietary plugins). The
> tools to create the streams should be free software.
> 
> We choosed to use feng as the streaming server because it supports
> RTP/RTSP and RTMP (now mostly free) with fallback on HTTP encapsulation
> and a lot of different non-proprietary codecs. 
> 
> Looking at MS website for Silverlight specifications it seems to me that
> streaming using the standard protocols cited above is not supported and
> that only MS codecs (that we don't like to use) can be used. We also
> investigated the possibility of writing a a managed RTP implementation
> but it seems that UDP is not supported in Silverlight. And even if we
> manage to have a working implementation of RTP it is not clear how you
> can decode the data and send it to the multimedia part of the framework.
> 
> So it seems that while we would much better like to work with
> Mono/Moonlight and keep compatibility with Silverlight in the end will
> be forced to use Adobe Flash (RTMP + one of the non-free codecs: at
> least there are open source tools to do the authoring and the encoding
> conversions).
> 
> I am writing to this list because I _hope_ we missed something and that
> Silverlight/Moonlight can be used to play streams using open protocols
> and codecs.

I /believe/ that Silverlight/Moonlight can do RTSP and RSTPT (and
obviously MMS), but I'm not 100% sure. I don't know too much about the
protocols but at one point I was helping out with the media streaming
code and noticed code to handle those 2 protocol schemes (although it's
possible that the code just did immediate fallback to http or something,
I can't remember).

Hopefully one of the moonlight media people can answer this more
accurately.

However, in the end, if you aren't happy with the codecs that
Silverlight supports, then even if we add support for your preferred
codec into Moonlight, it wouldn't solve your codec problem.

Out of curiosity, which codec do you plan on using?

Jeff