Moonlight 2.0 goes Beta

Today we released the Beta for Moonlight 2.0, a quick follow up to the original Moonlight preview that we did in early May.

Congratulations to the Moonlight team being lead by Chris Toshok on this release; And thanks a lot to the Silverlight team at Microsoft for helping us get here.

This means that Moonlight 2.0 is now feature complete and we consider it ready to test against Silverlight 2.0 sites. Users that have installed Moonlight 2.0 previously will be offered a chance next time they start Firefox to upgrade to the beta. New users can install Moonlight from: http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight-beta.

Although Microsoft has already released Silverlight 3.0 with new functionality and APIs it will take some time to be fully adopted, so while we might be behind Microsoft's offering, we still think that this will allow users to access most Silverlight content out there today.

Downloads

You can get Moonlight as:

• Mozilla plugin for Linux systems running on x86 or x86-64.
• Source code.

The Beta 1 Release Notes also contain compilation instructions and details on how to get Moonlight from our SVN repository.

Features from 3.0

The API implemented by Moonlight 2.0 is a slight superset of Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 as it contains a few of the 3.0 APIs that fit naturally into our development process. These include:

• Easing functions
• SaveFileDialog
• MultiScaleImage 3.0 API enhancements
• MediaStreamSource now supports PCM audio data, RGBA and YV12 video data (for your pluggable media codec needs).
• WriteableBitmap (for your Quaking needs)

As I previously mentioned, Moonlight 2.0 supports the Silverlight's 3.0 media pipeline. This media pipeline allows developers to plug C# code at various points in the media playback process.

In particular this means that you can use Silverlight and Moonlight with the Mono project's OGG, Vorbis and Dirac codecs[1] to play back media files that use the open codecs or to plug your own media codecs.

Already with Silverlight 2, users can provide their own code to fetch the media from a server and providing their own stream de-multiplexors. This allows developers to take advantage of content distribution networks, multiple quality video and audio streams and could even be used to download the media using BitTorrent on demand (BitSharp for instance is able to request packets in streaming order from peers).

[1] Dirac is a work-in-progress but the code is on SVN.