Microsoft Adding H.264 Support to Silverlight

Later this week at the International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam, Microsoft is planning to announce H.264 + AAC audio support for Silverlight.

Ben Waggoner has more.

So, why MPEG-4 support in Silverlight? It’s pretty straightforward, really. We have customers with libraries of H.264 content they wanted to publish to Silverlight, but didn’t want to reencode to VC-1. Silverlight’s strengths go far beyond media playback, and customers wanted the choice to deploy a wide variety of existing content within Silverlight. Silverlight aspires to provide as much choice as feasible as to how Silverlight can be authored and delivered. H.264 support is something we’d considered for past versions, but there were higher priority features we needed to deliver first. Silverlight 2 provides us a very rich base for delivering web apps, so we can start spreading our wings a bit.