Screw using a work-around! That's just an insult after what you all promised and failed to deliver. You guys really screwed the pooch with this one.
Your day to shine only shows off an extremely gimped, unimpressive player that's basically worthless in my opinion. Enhanced mode? Control center with 3 PIP screens that are so small that they look like postage stamps with tiny animations!? Hello? Silverlight
team, don't you realize this whole setup is a complete joke?
First question: After the stream has reached the end computer can Silverlight stretch the stream to fit the screen? If Silverlight can stretch
the stream then I'd expect the video quality to be degraded and I'd also expect Silverlight to make a best effort at maintaining quality. I'd also expect Silverlight to cope with screen sizes and resolutions automatically. And Tom, this is not a question just
for the Olympics -- it just a question in general. It's also not a political
question (i.e. NBC won't let us or whatever) it's a technical question. If we assume no political obstacles then can Silverlight make a best effort to stretch any video stream to fullscreen? These are questions folks will ask when evaluating whether
or not to adopt Silverlight over Flash. For the others who are reading this thread: Does Flash offer this functionality? I'd assume yes.
Second question: Assuming Silverlight can make a best effort to stretch any quality stream to full screen while gracefully handling any screen
size and resolution then how much coding effort is required to do this and offer the end users this functionality via a button on the player? Is it one line of code? (I'd actually expect that it'd be more than just a bit flip to enable. I wouldn't be surprised
if I, as the developer, had to specify letterbox, stretch to fit, zoom-in, etc. E.g. all the same options offered by an widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio TV when it's displaying a stream coming in at a 3:4 aspect ratio.) Again this is not a
political question but a technical one and one which will be asked when considering Silverlight against Flash. The preferable form of an answer to this question would be a link to the MSDN docs. This way those of us considering adopting Silveright
will know, authoritatively, that widescreen is possible and how to implement it in code.
Third question: Assuming widescreen is possible, is not too much trouble to implement, and is orthogonal to any challenges getting the stream
to Silverlight, is there another technical reason why MS\NBC hasn't decided to offer fullscreen mode. (Please don't post, "Because we were trying to maintain the best possible quality for the end user." Many end users are perfectly willing to accept
and even prefer degraded quality full screen video to small high quality video. See YouTube. And more to the point most developers would like to use a video player platform, Flash or Silverlight, that makes it easy for them to allow the user to make a fullscreen-or-not
choice.) And Tom, for the sake of your platform, I hope your answer is, "We made a mistake and it's actually very easy to provide fullscreen mode!" and not because
there actually is some technical deficiency in Silverlight not shared by Flash.
#1 - no, this is not a technical limitation of Silverlight. This was a limitation of the constraints around this specific project. Under most circumstances, fullscreen video is very easy to enable.
#2 - we didn't do it because we felt that it would be a bunch of additional design, development, and test work to support this and yet fit within the restrictions placed on us by the IOC. We also felt that stretching some of the lower bandwidth feeds to large
sizes would be a pretty bad user experience.
#3 - No, there's no other technical reason - if your computer is capable of stretching and displaying video at that size, then it should work fine in Silverlight.
If there's one thing that's come through loud and clear in the feedback on this, it's "Don't decide for us what tradeoff we want to make between video size and quality. Let the end user make that decision." We'll discuss your feedback with NBC this evening
and see if there's anything we can do.
I'm pretty happy with the image quality of the SL player at nbcolympics.com. Very cool to watch the women's cycling road race last night. Like being there in the pack.
Regarding the lack of full screen mode:
I wondered if this might partly be a deliberate limitation imposed by NBC so that the website streams didn't cannibalize their broadcast TV cash cow? You're saying that didn't play a part?
There don't seem to be that many ads in the player banner so far (just a static 728 bit wide JPG from GE mostly). Of course, that's good for viewing, but I'm wondering if it was hard to find advertisers who wanted to buy ads there? And why no ads in SL?
One thing that would be cool (but unlikely to happen) would be a web page showing a map of North America that displayed in real-time how many users were using the Olympics player, including the total bits streamed, total streams, etc. It would help build
an appreciation of the magnitude of the "event".
I must say I was extremely disappointed to not have a full screen option with the video player at first as well. However, after I read about how to get full screen in Firefox and tried it out, I'm very happy with it. I have my computer hooked up to 2 monitors,
one of which being my 37" HDTV. I just finished watching USA vs. Netherlands soccer game on it and it was fantastic quality at nearly full screen on the tv. It's a bit of a pain to align the video when it's in full screen because when the mouse is hovered
over a Silverlight app (or a Flash app) it disables the keyboard for the most part. What I mean is that Ctrl- and Ctrl+ don't work, F11 doesn't work, arrow keys don't work. Even Ctrl T (open new tab) and Ctrl F4 (close tab) don't work. This is a limitation
of Firefox, though, and as I said it happens with Flash content as well.
For those complaining about having to upgrade to Firefox 3 and refusing to do so, that's just an outright silly complaint unless there are some add-ons you absolutely must have that haven't been updated for 3.0 yet. Firefox 3's F11 full screen mode is much
better than 2.0's, that alone makes it better for watching full screen video in the browser.
To those who say they'll uninstall Silverlight after the Olympics, I think that's a bit ridiculous, too. Silverlight will be around more in the future, you may as well accept it. You don't uninstall the Flash add-on after you visit one website (and trust
me, there are many) that executes it horribly, do you? The lack of full screen video on the Olympics site has very little to do with limitations of Silverlight, so there's no reason to hold a grudge against it for the poor decision to not have a full screen
option. Silverlight is an excellent technology and it's not going away.
In summary, yes it sucks big time to not have a full screen option, but instead of yelling and screaming about it, maybe try the work around which works quite nicely. If you're normally an IE user, maybe this will show you what you're missing :).
Question 1: What are the "limitations of the constraints around this specific project" that prevent using fullscreen? Developers
who are evaluating using Silverlight over Flash would like to know. You say under "most circumstances" it's easy to enable full screen. Under what circumstances is it
not easy to enable? Is there a white paper or MSDN post describing the limitations?
Question 2: What test, design and development work does Microsoft expect developers building Silverlight applications to
do before they can enable Fullscreen? They need to know so they can compare that matrix to Flash. Right now your developers are asking themselves, "If Microsoft can't even run the fullscreen test matrix what chance do I have?" What is your response? Or is
it the scale of the Olympics is the problem? In which case the question is in what dimensions does Microsoft Silverlight fail to scale? And where is the white paper and where is the MSDN post describing the scale limitations?
Question 3: Why not take this whole episode as an opportunity to show the world and your developers how easy it is to enable
fullscreen by throwing the switch right in the middle of the Olympics? If there are bugs to be found at this scale
when else are you expecting to flesh them out? Your developers expect you to find and fix those bugs at Olympics scale so they have confidence that when their product is under heavy load it'll work. If you don't want to distribute full screen to everyone
then limit the distribution to folks that find this page. Add a disclaimer if you like. Say that this fullscreen version of the browser is not fully tested and there may be bugs that'll be reported and fixed. Prove to your developers just how easy it is to
enable and just how robust your technology is! Put your money where your posts are!Are you trying to compete with Flash or what?! Come on! Throw the switch. Why not?
Created account just to second Kingces's suggestion... At the given bandwidth the quality seems just fine to me using the Firefox 3.0 workaround (good thing we all have firefox). Take the plunge... the "enlarged video" mode sucks.
It's sad when the History channel has full screen videos w/ Flash and Microsoft won't even step up to the plate with their Silverlight Olympics expo.
If you're truly worried about bandwidth issues, give it a couple more days with the current set-up and I'd wager that viewership will have dropped so low that bandwidth will be the least of your concerns.
... almost forgot... I may be mistaken, but isn't one of the great features of Silverlight supposed to be that it can dynamically resize video (by the end user)?... if this is true, why not let the user decide the size and make their own judgement call about
video quality? (which will be good anyway) You guys seem to be missing out on an excellent opportunity to showcase here by limiting the functionality so much. If you're only goal was to get the Silverlight plugin on machines, couldn't you just send it out
w/ a Windows update??
There is one more thing that seems to contradict some of those arguments where no full screen = better quality. Shouldn't switching to full screen theoretically improve watching experience? After all - the process can be prioritized and more ‘focused’ on decoding
the video to entire viewport while de-prioritizing all other windows that could cause slow downs . This includes browser windows, worst case with flashy banners etc. Sure you can’t make up for number of pixels but still. This should be left totally for user
decision. All those workarounds with FireFox, which is pain, just ridicule the technology in front of those people who stumble upon it first time. What was the outcome of your meeting with NBC? Any go-ahead, write that one-line of code and make thousands
of users happy? Thanks…
I believe a quick fix is available for IE. In IE, press F11 for full screen mode. I zoomed the video by 200% (from combobox in the status bar) to fill my 28" (twenty-eight) Viewsonic monitor (1920x1200). I scrolled the video into view and pushed the chrome
away. The video is great!
The only problem seems to be the Javascript (or SL) in the HTML page wants to reset the scrollbar every 20 seconds, when the banner disappears from view. Could you have NBC move the banner to the left-hand side of the HTML page to prevent the scrolling?
2.) there are some restrictions placed on the usage of full screen video by the IOC. That also factored into the design of this video player.
This is probably the only reason they don't have full screen in the Olympic video player. I signed on just to say the lack of a full screen mode is incredibly thickheaded and makes Microsoft and NBC and the IOC look very incompetent and archaic. Why even
use Silverlight? Why not just have NBC staffers post videos to Youtube where they actually have full screen capability?
macman4000
0 Points
5 Posts
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 10, 2008 03:38 PM | LINK
Your day to shine only shows off an extremely gimped, unimpressive player that's basically worthless in my opinion. Enhanced mode? Control center with 3 PIP screens that are so small that they look like postage stamps with tiny animations!? Hello? Silverlight team, don't you realize this whole setup is a complete joke?
kingces95
Member
6 Points
3 Posts
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 10, 2008 07:06 PM | LINK
Tom,
First question: After the stream has reached the end computer can Silverlight stretch the stream to fit the screen? If Silverlight can stretch the stream then I'd expect the video quality to be degraded and I'd also expect Silverlight to make a best effort at maintaining quality. I'd also expect Silverlight to cope with screen sizes and resolutions automatically. And Tom, this is not a question just for the Olympics -- it just a question in general. It's also not a political question (i.e. NBC won't let us or whatever) it's a technical question. If we assume no political obstacles then can Silverlight make a best effort to stretch any video stream to fullscreen? These are questions folks will ask when evaluating whether or not to adopt Silverlight over Flash. For the others who are reading this thread: Does Flash offer this functionality? I'd assume yes.
Second question: Assuming Silverlight can make a best effort to stretch any quality stream to full screen while gracefully handling any screen size and resolution then how much coding effort is required to do this and offer the end users this functionality via a button on the player? Is it one line of code? (I'd actually expect that it'd be more than just a bit flip to enable. I wouldn't be surprised if I, as the developer, had to specify letterbox, stretch to fit, zoom-in, etc. E.g. all the same options offered by an widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio TV when it's displaying a stream coming in at a 3:4 aspect ratio.) Again this is not a political question but a technical one and one which will be asked when considering Silverlight against Flash. The preferable form of an answer to this question would be a link to the MSDN docs. This way those of us considering adopting Silveright will know, authoritatively, that widescreen is possible and how to implement it in code.
Third question: Assuming widescreen is possible, is not too much trouble to implement, and is orthogonal to any challenges getting the stream to Silverlight, is there another technical reason why MS\NBC hasn't decided to offer fullscreen mode. (Please don't post, "Because we were trying to maintain the best possible quality for the end user." Many end users are perfectly willing to accept and even prefer degraded quality full screen video to small high quality video. See YouTube. And more to the point most developers would like to use a video player platform, Flash or Silverlight, that makes it easy for them to allow the user to make a fullscreen-or-not choice.) And Tom, for the sake of your platform, I hope your answer is, "We made a mistake and it's actually very easy to provide fullscreen mode!" and not because there actually is some technical deficiency in Silverlight not shared by Flash.
tomtaylormsft
Member
579 Points
165 Posts
Microsoft
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 10, 2008 07:40 PM | LINK
Great questions:
#1 - no, this is not a technical limitation of Silverlight. This was a limitation of the constraints around this specific project. Under most circumstances, fullscreen video is very easy to enable.
#2 - we didn't do it because we felt that it would be a bunch of additional design, development, and test work to support this and yet fit within the restrictions placed on us by the IOC. We also felt that stretching some of the lower bandwidth feeds to large sizes would be a pretty bad user experience.
#3 - No, there's no other technical reason - if your computer is capable of stretching and displaying video at that size, then it should work fine in Silverlight.
If there's one thing that's come through loud and clear in the feedback on this, it's "Don't decide for us what tradeoff we want to make between video size and quality. Let the end user make that decision." We'll discuss your feedback with NBC this evening and see if there's anything we can do.
- Tom
Tom Taylor | Microsoft Silverlight
Alan Cobb
Member
479 Points
208 Posts
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 02:32 AM | LINK
Hi Tom,
I'm pretty happy with the image quality of the SL player at nbcolympics.com. Very cool to watch the women's cycling road race last night. Like being there in the pack.
Regarding the lack of full screen mode:
I wondered if this might partly be a deliberate limitation imposed by NBC so that the website streams didn't cannibalize their broadcast TV cash cow? You're saying that didn't play a part?
There don't seem to be that many ads in the player banner so far (just a static 728 bit wide JPG from GE mostly). Of course, that's good for viewing, but I'm wondering if it was hard to find advertisers who wanted to buy ads there? And why no ads in SL?
One thing that would be cool (but unlikely to happen) would be a web page showing a map of North America that displayed in real-time how many users were using the Olympics player, including the total bits streamed, total streams, etc. It would help build an appreciation of the magnitude of the "event".
Thanks,
Alan Cobb
www.alancobb.com/blog (Silverlight blog)
TWallace
Member
10 Points
5 Posts
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 03:34 AM | LINK
I must say I was extremely disappointed to not have a full screen option with the video player at first as well. However, after I read about how to get full screen in Firefox and tried it out, I'm very happy with it. I have my computer hooked up to 2 monitors, one of which being my 37" HDTV. I just finished watching USA vs. Netherlands soccer game on it and it was fantastic quality at nearly full screen on the tv. It's a bit of a pain to align the video when it's in full screen because when the mouse is hovered over a Silverlight app (or a Flash app) it disables the keyboard for the most part. What I mean is that Ctrl- and Ctrl+ don't work, F11 doesn't work, arrow keys don't work. Even Ctrl T (open new tab) and Ctrl F4 (close tab) don't work. This is a limitation of Firefox, though, and as I said it happens with Flash content as well.
For those complaining about having to upgrade to Firefox 3 and refusing to do so, that's just an outright silly complaint unless there are some add-ons you absolutely must have that haven't been updated for 3.0 yet. Firefox 3's F11 full screen mode is much better than 2.0's, that alone makes it better for watching full screen video in the browser.
To those who say they'll uninstall Silverlight after the Olympics, I think that's a bit ridiculous, too. Silverlight will be around more in the future, you may as well accept it. You don't uninstall the Flash add-on after you visit one website (and trust me, there are many) that executes it horribly, do you? The lack of full screen video on the Olympics site has very little to do with limitations of Silverlight, so there's no reason to hold a grudge against it for the poor decision to not have a full screen option. Silverlight is an excellent technology and it's not going away.
In summary, yes it sucks big time to not have a full screen option, but instead of yelling and screaming about it, maybe try the work around which works quite nicely. If you're normally an IE user, maybe this will show you what you're missing :).
kingces95
Member
6 Points
3 Posts
Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 05:24 AM | LINK
Tom, three more questions:
Question 1: What are the "limitations of the constraints around this specific project" that prevent using fullscreen? Developers who are evaluating using Silverlight over Flash would like to know. You say under "most circumstances" it's easy to enable full screen. Under what circumstances is it not easy to enable? Is there a white paper or MSDN post describing the limitations?
Question 2: What test, design and development work does Microsoft expect developers building Silverlight applications to do before they can enable Fullscreen? They need to know so they can compare that matrix to Flash. Right now your developers are asking themselves, "If Microsoft can't even run the fullscreen test matrix what chance do I have?" What is your response? Or is it the scale of the Olympics is the problem? In which case the question is in what dimensions does Microsoft Silverlight fail to scale? And where is the white paper and where is the MSDN post describing the scale limitations?
Question 3: Why not take this whole episode as an opportunity to show the world and your developers how easy it is to enable fullscreen by throwing the switch right in the middle of the Olympics? If there are bugs to be found at this scale when else are you expecting to flesh them out? Your developers expect you to find and fix those bugs at Olympics scale so they have confidence that when their product is under heavy load it'll work. If you don't want to distribute full screen to everyone then limit the distribution to folks that find this page. Add a disclaimer if you like. Say that this fullscreen version of the browser is not fully tested and there may be bugs that'll be reported and fixed. Prove to your developers just how easy it is to enable and just how robust your technology is! Put your money where your posts are! Are you trying to compete with Flash or what?! Come on! Throw the switch. Why not?
HasPotential
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: Re: Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 06:55 AM | LINK
Created account just to second Kingces's suggestion... At the given bandwidth the quality seems just fine to me using the Firefox 3.0 workaround (good thing we all have firefox). Take the plunge... the "enlarged video" mode sucks.
It's sad when the History channel has full screen videos w/ Flash and Microsoft won't even step up to the plate with their Silverlight Olympics expo.
If you're truly worried about bandwidth issues, give it a couple more days with the current set-up and I'd wager that viewership will have dropped so low that bandwidth will be the least of your concerns.
... almost forgot... I may be mistaken, but isn't one of the great features of Silverlight supposed to be that it can dynamically resize video (by the end user)?... if this is true, why not let the user decide the size and make their own judgement call about video quality? (which will be good anyway) You guys seem to be missing out on an excellent opportunity to showcase here by limiting the functionality so much. If you're only goal was to get the Silverlight plugin on machines, couldn't you just send it out w/ a Windows update??MichaelTOC
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 04:53 PM | LINK
kitemike
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 11, 2008 09:08 PM | LINK
Tom,
I believe a quick fix is available for IE. In IE, press F11 for full screen mode. I zoomed the video by 200% (from combobox in the status bar) to fill my 28" (twenty-eight) Viewsonic monitor (1920x1200). I scrolled the video into view and pushed the chrome away. The video is great!
The only problem seems to be the Javascript (or SL) in the HTML page wants to reset the scrollbar every 20 seconds, when the banner disappears from view. Could you have NBC move the banner to the left-hand side of the HTML page to prevent the scrolling?
Mike
dude243man
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: Re: NBC+Olympics+Silverlight 2.0= No Full screen mode?
Aug 12, 2008 04:18 AM | LINK
2.) there are some restrictions placed on the usage of full screen video by the IOC. That also factored into the design of this video player.
This is probably the only reason they don't have full screen in the Olympic video player. I signed on just to say the lack of a full screen mode is incredibly thickheaded and makes Microsoft and NBC and the IOC look very incompetent and archaic. Why even use Silverlight? Why not just have NBC staffers post videos to Youtube where they actually have full screen capability?