January 8th, 2009
Using the Moonlight plugin to watch a little Silverlight - 0
In early December 2008 Moonlight 1.0 beta was released by the Mono team, making it possible to run basic Silverlight 1.0 applications from your Linux Firefox installation. If you are like me mostly working on a Linux workstation, then its likely that you have seen little so far of the Microsoft Silverlight platform. The best way to think of Silverlight 1.0 is as Flash, but then by Microsoft. Similar to Flash, Silverlight installs as a web browser plugin and provides animation, graphics and audio/video. The next generation (Silverlight 2.0) includes support for running C# managed code from the plugin which should make things quite interesting.
What is Moonlight?
Moonlight is an Open Source implementation by Novell and the Mono team of Microsoft Silverlight. It was born out of a 21 day hacking session by the Mono team in early 2007. This was possible as much code needed for building Moonlight was already implemented by the Mono team for their C# libraries. Cleaning things up took them a little longer and the first beta was released in December 2008.
Currently Moonlight implements Silverlight 1.0, but work on Silverlight 2.0 has already been started. The Moonlight roadmap shows that we will have to wait a little longer for that though, the first alpha is not planned until April 2009. Moonlight 2.0 is where things will become really interesting as it will contain a mono implementation allowing you to execute C# or Dynamic Language Runtime based languages.
Installing Moonlight
- You can install Moonlight 1.0 for Firefox from http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
- If you come across a website that requires video codecs, Moonlight will offer to install the Microsoft codecs for playback.
Testing if things work
Enough dry stuff — I am not expecting miracles from a beta release, but it would of course be nice if somethings do actually work. For some examples have a look at the Moonlight status page of scripts that they have tested their plug-in against:
Troubleshooting
Not all websites detect Silverlight 1.0 properly, so if you come across a website saying “Silverlight 1.0 not found” you migth need a bit of work. A little GreaseMonkey script can help out here as explained on the MoonLight Quirks page.
Video codecs and legal issues
Through an agreement between Novell and Microsoft it is possible to legally use the Microsoft Codecs for decoding audio and video streams, but only if you download the Moonlight beta’s directly from Novell. As an alternative it should be possible to compile the Moonlight from source against the open source FFMPEG libraries as mentioned by Miguel de Icaza on his blog: “Currently Moonlight video support has been prototyped using the fabulous and LGPLed ffmpeg engine for video and audio. We are unable to redistribute this code commercially due to licensing conflicts. Update: This means that individuals that want to use a 100% pure free software setup can do so. We are unable to redistribute this edition though. “
Image credit: Moonlight by James Jordan
Tags: firefox, mono, moonlight, silverlight
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