[Live-devel] Windows Media Player?

[Jeremy Noring]

This is probably extremely OT (sorry Ross, feel free not to post should you
feel the need to moderate), but I've written media code for MSFT platforms
for the last seven years so I can comment on this.

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Dom Robinson <d2 at d2consulting.co.uk> wrote:

> I doubt you could do anything to get msft to 'return' to focusing on
> developing wmp. Their focus has sensibly gone to silverlight and frag
> 4 / TCP (http) now so there is no commercial sense in continuing to
> 'improve' wmp. RIAs and browsers are the only 'battle ground' now
> 'media players' are 'old hat'. The enterprise is going to switch on
> flash like crazy this year with adobe adding multicast support and
> that will flush wmp leaving silverlight (which already plays msft
> multicast) as the only contender.
>

Silverlight is extensible to support new protocols and codecs.  There are
restrictions on the protocols you can use (in particular, no UDP) due to
security issues, but there's no reason you couldn't extend silverlight to
receive "standards" based RTSP and RTP-over-TCP.  The one caveat is you'd
need your stack to be in C# (it's all managed code), so Live555 isn't going
to help here. AFAIK, there is no decent, open source RTSP stack for managed
code, but it's been a while since I looked.  Hopefully someone will toss one
together (Ross, if you want to make some money...people'd pay).


This will be because its not something msft
> are going to pay for (imagine the licensing costs due to mpeg by msft
> if that was possible).
>

This isn't the case with Windows 7.  MSFT finally bit the bullet and
licensed MPEG2, H264 and AAC codecs (thank god, it's about time), and
silverlight supports H264/AAC.  So these days are rapidly going to be behind
us.  I should also add that silverlight is vastly preferable to WMP,
particularly if you're hosting the player online.



> Standards or not, that issue is actually caused by MPEG licensing and
> not MSFT (unless you feel that MSFT is duty bound to pay MPEG for
> license fees for us?)
>

Apple has always done this.  They've been shipping with MPEG2/DVD/H264 for
_years_ so why shouldn't I expect the same from MSFT?


> Writing an rstp plug in for IIS would be interesting
>

Quite frankly, screw IIS/WMS--it'd make more sense to simply start with a
server that supports RTSP in a standard compliant way, out of the box (e.g.
wowza).  There are (IMO) much better options for streaming servers than
IIS/WMS, particularly if you want to deliver a codec that doesn't blow (e.g.
H264).  And WMS, to this day, has atrocious latency issues.
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