HD Video Silverlight Firefox Extension, Requires Flash?

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Mar 28

HD Video Silverlight Firefox Extension, Requires Flash?

Flash, Silverlight/WPFe, Video Add comments

Quote:

“Move Media Player and MicrosoftÃ¢â‚¬â„¢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.

5 comments

§ John Dowdell said on : 28/03/08 @ 18:06
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
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 28/03/08 @ 18:16
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.
§ Gabriel said on : 29/03/08 @ 00:06
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.
§ it-bbr said on : 24/04/08 @ 10:43
"It's secure and handles load better supposedly" - thatÃ‚Â´s only a rumor or can you provide some hard facts? One of my clients uses Silverlight heavily - and is lucky (performance, etc)
§ Phillip Kerman said on : 06/06/08 @ 22:48
Two things: I think the value of move is that it works over http and it works. Second thing... it's not like any normal end user is going to care what all the underlying technologies are that bring them content. They want to see the content. If that means there's silverlight, flash, and move... plus who knows what else going on they don't care.