Silverlight 3 sees release

Posted by Jas-n on July 10th, 2009 | 0 comments

silverlightMicrosoft has recently announced the availability of its latest web multimedia viewer, the rival to Adobe’s Flash, Silverlight 3.0.

Improvements
Silverlight see’s no less than 50 key new features and tweaks that bring the viewer up to, if not past, Flash. Some of these features include:

  • 3D Support
  • GPU Acceleration
  • H.264 video support
  • Out-of-browser support (enabling developers to run applications from the desktop, without the need of a web browser)
  • Dramatic video performance and quality improvements.

Smooth Streaming
One of the more interesting features is “Smooth Streaming” which enables viewers to watch HD (720p and above) video instantly, without the need of buffering.
You can see an example of Smooth Streaming via the Official Smooth Streaming Website.

CPU and Network Performance
The Neowin writer did a quick performance test* between a YouTube HQ video (which uses Flash) and a HD Silverlight Smooth Streaming video using the built-in performance graphs on Windows Task Manager. The following chart shows that when using the optimal video quality, Silverlight spreads it’s load over the different processor cores, and even user less network bandwidth.

silverlight_vs_flash

*The computer used was a Quad Core machine running with 4gb of RAM.

You can download Silverlight 3.0 from Microsoft

[Via Neowin.net]

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