Ah, So *that's* What Silverlight Does

I first came across Silverlight when I was on the Microsoft site, I think it was in a customer service area. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I do trust Microsoft to certain extent not to install anything too harmful on my computer (after all, I already have Vista installed so what else could they do to me?).

So Silverlight has been installed on my computer for some time now, and I dutifully install the updates as they come available – even though I had no bloody idea what the heck it did.

But this webpage finally clued me in.

Silverlight is like Adobe flash – sort of. From what I understand, Silverlight was built from the ground up to specifically handle Web video properly. It turns out that most of the video that we watch, including most of the stuff from YouTube, delivered by flash technology is really just a kludge using flash for something it was never really designed for.

One of the cool things about Silverlight is that you are able to throttle the download speed of the video as you're watching it. If you have a fast Internet connection you can leave it at the max setting and you get great results. If you are on a slower connection you can throttle it back and the software will deliver good quality at a lower bit rate without causing stutters and stops.

Silverlight will also use your graphics card to handle the decoding that flash forces your processor to do. This also results in higher quality video being available.

I'm definitely not a Microsoft fan boy, but I would really like Silverlight or something like it to replace flash as a standard for delivering Web video. It's a much more elegant solution, and much better for the end user.