New High-Definition Video Capabilities for Silverlight

The International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) 2008 in Amsterdam will act as the stage where Microsoft plans to showcase the new high-definition video capabilities of Silverlight. The Redmond company's Adobe Flash killer will deliver in future versions support for the H.264 and AAC file formats. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division and the head of the Silverlight design team, indicated that the upcoming support for additional video and audio content formats is the company's way of ensuring choice for consumers.

“At IBC 2008 we will be demonstrating a technology preview of H.264 video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio playback support in Silverlight, and H.264 authoring using Microsoft Expression Encoder and Windows Server 2008 for delivery. Until now, Silverlight has supported the SMPTE VC-1 and Windows Media formats, as well as MP3 for audio, enabling customers to take advantage of broad support across the Windows Media ecosystem, including third-party tools, service providers and content delivery networks,” Guthrie said.

Silverlight, a technology developed by Microsoft to go against Flash, is designed to offer end users compelling experiences via web-based Rich Interactive Applications, independent of browser, or operating system. According to the Redmond giant's official plans, Silverlight 2.0, now in Beta 2 stage, is planned for release by the end of 2008.

“One of the key advantages of Silverlight 2, which will ship later this fall, is that it includes a cross-browser, cross-platform version of the Microsoft .NET Framework, specifically optimized for rich Internet applications (RIAs). That means you can build Silverlight applications using .NET languages, so the large talent pool of more than 4 million .NET developers worldwide can now create RIAs using their existing skills and tools, reducing time to market and raising quality for our customers,” Guthrie added.

Here are the downloads for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 from Softpedia:

- Microsoft Silverlight 2.0.30523.6 Beta 2
- Microsoft Silverlight 2.0.30523.6 SDK Beta 2
- Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 2.0
- Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview.