Silverlight shines on Linux

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 12 Feb 2009 at 10:58

An open-source version of Microsoft's Silverlight has arrived on Linux.

The open-source Silverlight project, dubbed Moonlight, is a plug in for Firefox that offers Linux users the chance to play the same content as their PC and Mac-based cousins.

Moonlight was created by the Novell-backed Mono team and is available for all major Linux distros including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

The project also has the backing of Microsoft, which is looking to speed adoption of Silverlight in the face of Adobe's dominant Flash.

To that end, included in Moonlight is the Windows Media Pack, bringing support for Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma), and MP3. Moonlight will prompt users to install the codecs as and when they are required by websites.

"The entire media work involved hard work at every level, but it was worth the effort," says project leader Miguel de Icaza. "We now have one of the best open-source media pipelines implemented. And it will only get better with all the new features in Silverlight 2 for adaptive streaming."

It was a sentiment echoed by Microsoft: "We have worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community," says Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET developer division.

The mono team is now working on Moonlight 2, which will be compatible with Silverlight 2.