Posted by Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] on 08/20/07 21:00

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:17:20 -0700, David <d33licious@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I was wondering, if you played with both Adobe Flash and Microsoft's
>Silverlight. Personally, I think that Flash just has more leading
>technology to play around with. How would you compare both the
>products?


Flash does progressive download, as does Silverlight 1.0
Silverlight 1.1 will do streaming, which Fash doesn't offer.

Flash streaming servers** cost tens of thousands of $$$ for the
*software* (WM Server is more like a few thousand), leaving out
hardware costs which are likely to be comparable.

Bulk flash encoding software using On2 VP6 costs about $30-40000 which
is why it's taken this long for YouTube to consider that as an option.

It's not ideal for startups or even major companies to test with
unless they have disposably deep pockets.

There's a much much wider selection of codec settings and types in the
WMV culuture compared to the On2 selection currently available (VP3,
VP6 and MP3 audio I think).

So, technically I think it has a long way to go.

BTW you missed out Quicktime and Realnetworks in your comparison so
its not really much of a discussion yet.

Cheers - Neil

** Other than Red5 which is good, but not production ready yet.
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

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