Moonlight, the open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight for Linux and Unix/X11 systems, has reached version 2.0 Beta 1. Moonlight 2.0 API is a superset of Silverlight 2.0 API because it contains features from Silverlight 3.0.
Beside all the features in Silverlight 2.0, Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 contains the following features from 3.0:
- Easing functions
- SaveFileDialog
- MultiScaleImage 3.0 API enhancements
- MediaStreamSource now supports PCM audio data, RGBA and YV12 video data.
- WriteableBitmap is supported.
Miguel de Icaza mentions as an important feature the support of 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).
It is interesting that the installer jumped from a mere 0.9 MB for version 1.0 to 9.3 MB. The supported platforms have remained the same. The source code can be downloaded as a tarball or from Mono’s SVN repository.
The Moonlight team advices on using this beta only with trusted sites because the code, while feature complete, has not yet passed the security audit. Users are invited to check out the Moonlight Security Status page for latest related information.
More information on Moonlight can be found on InfoQ/Moonlight.
