28 March 2008

HD Video Silverlight Firefox Extension, Requires Flash?

Written by Richard Leggett (

)
Published on March 28th, 2008 @ 04:46:30 pm, using 166 words, 1148 views

Categories: Flash, Silverlight/WPFe, Video

Quote:

“Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform”

Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx).

It seems a lot of effort to go to, cross communicating between Flash, JavaScript, Silverlight and Firefox, when you could have made the whole player using just one technology. I don’t get the point of the Firefox extension in the first place, the video controls require Flash Player anyway, and if they had used Silverlight for them you’d need that plugin so why bother with this extension at all?

Try it here.

Permanent Link 4 comments

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: John Dowdell

Thanks, Richard, this confused me too. When I visit movenetworks.com in Firefox with FlashBlocker I see text for Move's video and Silverlight's video, but for rich media I just see Adobe Flash. I didn't do any of their downloads to see what else I might see. Strange.

Can you tell if it's like the situation at MLB.com, or do you see a difference in their Flash dependencies?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=485
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1237
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2008/03/mlbcom_2008.cfm

jd/adobe

Permalink 28/03/08 @ 18:06

Comment from: Richard Leggett [Member]

I'm sure there's a lot of value in their back-end and analytics proposition but when the very first consumer facing example you see is put together like that it doesn't inspire confidence. Confusing is the word. There is a button to request more info... or there's Brightcove, Akamai et al.

Permalink 28/03/08 @ 18:16

Comment from: Gabriel

The reason that i've heard for Move Networks and it's inability to use Flash for it's video is becuase of it's distribution methods. It's secure and handles load better supposedly. But i just wish they would use Flash instead, their plugin crashes my browser every time.

Permalink 29/03/08 @ 00:06

Comment from: it-bbr

"It's secure and handles load better supposedly" - that´s only a rumor or can you provide some hard facts? One of my clients uses Silverlight heavily - and is lucky (performance, etc)

Permalink 24/04/08 @ 10:43

About

Richard Leggett is a Senior Creative Developer at AKQA, London. He is co-author of Foundation Flash Applications for Mobile Devices (Friend of ED), an Adobe Community Expert and speaker at industry conferences and user groups.