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.<br><br>On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Dom Robinson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:d2@d2consulting.co.uk">d2@d2consulting.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I doubt you could do anything to get msft to 'return' to focusing on<br>
developing wmp. Their focus has sensibly gone to silverlight and frag<br>
4 / TCP (http) now so there is no commercial sense in continuing to<br>
'improve' wmp. RIAs and browsers are the only 'battle ground' now<br>
'media players' are 'old hat'. The enterprise is going to switch on<br>
flash like crazy this year with adobe adding multicast support and<br>
that will flush wmp leaving silverlight (which already plays msft<br>
multicast) as the only contender.<br></blockquote><div><br>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).<br>
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This will be because its not something msft<br>
are going to pay for (imagine the licensing costs due to mpeg by msft<br>
if that was possible). <br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Standards or not, that issue is actually caused by MPEG licensing and<br>
not MSFT (unless you feel that MSFT is duty bound to pay MPEG for<br>
license fees for us?)<br></blockquote><div><br>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?<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Writing an rstp plug in for IIS would be interesting<br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
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