Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, the open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Linux, was released on December 2, 2008, as part of a technical collaboration between Novell and Microsoft. This version provides support for Microsoft Media Pack, enabling users of Linux computers to playback multimedia files (audio and video) with the help of audio and video decoders contained in Silverlight.

Test suites for Silverlight are provided on the Microsoft official website, alongside the Media Pack for Linux which includes the licensed media codecs for video and audio files. Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 will make possible the correct rendering of websites having Silverlight based audio and video content in Linux and other Unix/X11 operating systems.

In the release notes there is specified that Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 comes with multimedia rendering enhancements for the achievement of an optimal performance, memory leaks fixes and more.

Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 is distributed as Firefox plugin, being available for both 32 and 64 bit architectures. Moonlight can also be built from source with the desired multimedia codecs and easily ported to other platforms.

The minimal requirements for Moonlight are: a x86 or x86-64 computer having 128 MB and Firefox 2.0 or Firefox 3.0 web browser. The Microsoft Media Pack will be automatically installed after the installation of Moonlight.

The usage of Firefox 3.0 is recommended because it supports windowless operations, a feature present in many Silverlight based applications. Moonlight was tested successfully with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora Core 9 in case of both Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 web browsers. Moonlight 1.0 Final version is expected to be released on January 20, 2009.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 6:51 am and is filed under IT News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.