Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper.  The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and  Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

 

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

 

 

 

 Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats.  The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

 

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Mac Users don't just switch from Windows..

by Don Burnett

I found this amusing post by Nik Cubrilovic of OmniDrive. I have also seen his writing at TechCrunch.. Apparently back in May he made the "SWITCH" but not the way the marketing folks have you programmed to think. His Mac crashed and he couldn't get back the partition, so he made the switch to Windows Vista. This is a comment from his blog...

Nik Cubrilovic:

"I didn’t expect it to be like this, I didn’t want Vista to be this good - I was expecting to boot back into OS X and living happily ever after, but damn, this is one fast, slick and nice operating system. If you are a Mac user try it yourself, install boot camp and Vista and it will feel like you just added another CPU and doubled your RAM - I can’t see any evidence for any of the reports of Vista being slow or power-hungry.

Some surprises I have had since running Vista: the first was when I ran Media Center (which has been updated with a new interface and with new features) it detected the Xbox 360 and the other Media Center on the network - making it easy to stream and share music and video content. Media Center is also a much nicer and richer experience than Frontrow. The default security model is much better than what it was. As somebody who has published over a dozen security vulnerabilities for Windows I can see how the new security initiatives within Microsoft that started 4-5 years ago have really taken hold in every part of the operating system and applications - IE has gone from being a hacked up toy to a serious browser that keeps users safe from themselves. "

Another happy Vista user running on Apple Hardware..