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Archive for the ‘HTML5’ Category

Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework for Windows 8 Release Preview

Posted in HTML5, Media, Programming Tools, Win8 Metro, Windows Azure, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 1, 2012| 32 Comments »

In case you missed the news, Microsoft just hit a major milestone on its road to shipping Windows 8 with the public launch of the Release Preview version. With this new version comes new features and as expected: a number of trivial, yet importing changes that will affect app developers and their apps.

Meanwhile, here at Vertigo we’ve been toiling day (and sometimes night) to help developers and clients prepare for this update so they can hit the ground running and create some of the first apps to ship on the new platform.

One such effort that we were proud to release alongside the launch of Windows 8 Release Preview is the update to the Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework (an open source video player component for Windows 8 metro style apps).

win8_pf.jpg

While Windows 8 includes some essential and great components to help building top notch media apps (namely the MediaElement for Xaml developers and the Video tag for JavaScript/HTML developers), the purpose of these components is primarily aimed at providing the fundamentals and low level support for playing audio and video. We here at Vertigo Software know video and we know that there is still a mountain to climb before you can ship a great media app. In a joint effort with Microsoft, we’ve worked hard to fill this gap by building a media player framework to make it simple and straightforward to accomplish the vast majority of your media app needs in Windows 8.

The Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework ships with a JavaScript and Xaml version of the framework that offers out of the box features to build great video apps without the fuss and months of development required to build your own media player. Besides support for the Windows 8 Release Preview, our latest update also includes support for major features such as player DVR controls (scrubbing, FF, RW, play/pause, …etc), player styling and branding, closed captioning, and just released today: video advertising!

Video advertising is very different from traditional banner advertising – which is already included with the Microsoft Advertising SDK. Video advertising allows you to seamlessly connect to video ad servers and stitch together commercials, overlays, and companion ads with your own content.

Advertising is an extremely important monetization strategy for many media companies and an equally significant undertaking to build from scratch. With the latest version of the player framework, you can simply add the new advertising plugin, schedule when ads should play and point your app at a VAST standards compliant ad server to play ads with your content. Ad scheduling, downloading, playback, and tracking is all handled for you by the player framework using IAB recommended standards such as VAST and VPAID.

Download everything you need today to start (or finish) your media app for Windows 8:

Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework

Windows 8 Release Preview

Visual Studio 2012 RC

Smooth Streaming SDK

PlayReady DRM SDK

 

Enjoy!

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How HTML5 can compete with Silverlight and Flash

Posted in HTML5, Silverlight tips and tricks, tagged , , , , on September 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »

In case you haven’t heard, Google just debuted Google Chrome Frame; allowing developers to run the Google Chrome rendering engine inside IE as a plugin and thereby trumping IE.

Reading blogs like this one, I distinctly get the feeling that most of the tech journalists out there don’t understand what this is really all about. This is not about Google being annoyed with old versions of IE, it’s about HTML5 vs. Silverlight vs. Flash. Right now HTML5 has 3 big disadvantages over their plugin counterparts…

  1. Different browsers will implement HTML5 differently. Even if it is standards based. 
  2. Most browsers don’t support HTML5 and getting a user to switch browsers is a lot harder than getting them to install a plugin.
  3. Standards based innovation is slow. HTML5 in its entirety should be ready for browsers to implement in 2012; just in time to be as far behind Flash and Silverlight as HTML4 is today.

In the end, there are only 2 ways around all of these disadvantages:

  1. Either get everyone to use your browser or
  2. Run everything thru a plugin.

Google Chrome (the browser) and Google Chrome Frame together make it possible for developers to write and test code in an IE-less world, thereby getting more developers to care about Chrome, less to care about IE, and more to choose HTML5 as a framework to develop apps on.

Right now the plugin is an ActiveX plugin and therefore only works on IE, but give Google some time and I’m sure they’ll have a Netscape plugin too that will work in Safari and Firefox. It’s only a matter of time before you Google will be nearly in complete control over how HTML5 will be rendered (if the developer chooses so) and thereby won’t need to wait on a standards committe to approve further innovation to HTML.

Of course, the picture is even bigger than that… whoever owns the developers will own the dominant OS. In my opinion, this is all a tactic in the Android/Chrome OS vs. iApple vs. Windows war and the reason Google built Chrome in the first place.

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