Moonshine: drinking fermented Windows Media content on Linux

Feb 13, 2009, 20:01 (3 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Ryan Paul)

"Moonlight 1.0, which was officially released Wednesday, automatically downloads a proprietary codec pack from Microsoft in order to provide Linux users with legally licensed support for Microsoft's video formats. Bockover's plugin uses the NPAPI to register itself as the default consumer of Windows Media content and then, when it is invoked by the browser, uses Moonlight to embed a Silverlight-based streaming video player—which he wrote entirely in XAML and JavaScript—in the page to handle WMV.

"Linux users typically rely on embedded Totem or MPlayer plugins to view streaming WMV content in the browser. This can be problematic, because it requires the user to obtain the Microsoft codecs on their own, by buying them commercially from Fluendo or using unlicensed codecs obtained from servers outside of the United States. Moonshine eliminates that complexity and legal ambiguity by allowing users to watch WMV content with fully licensed codecs that are obtained directly from Microsoft with an automatic updater."

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