Microsoft Silverlight worst plugin ever? Why yes, yes it is.

So, how did you spend your Draft Day? Cause I spent mine FUCKING AROUND WITH BULLSHIT SOFTWARE FROM BULLSHIT PEOPLE!

Title says it all. All week I’ve been caught up in the hype for the NHL Draft, live streaming on TSN.ca at 5pm. This may be the last chance for the Maple Leafs to offer any hope of really rebuilding their cruddy franchise.

Sure enough, 5pm rolls around, click the link...15 minutes later, after un/de/re/installing Microsoft’s shame of a web-experience plugin “Silverlight”, and that includes running it in Windows XP in Parallels, by the way...I FINALLY get to start watching the show. You must know “Silverlight”...it’s the new “cross-platform” super-duper streaming media plugin that never let’s you down, even during your favourite sports draft day!

Tampa Day picks Steve Stamkos 1st overall, big surprise. Few more picks are made, life is good again.

What’s this? The Leafs and New York Islanders are about to announce a trade! Sweet, please tell me the Leafs managed to unload McCabe!

(pause)

(freeze)

(stream dies)

(click click click click click click, refresh, refresh, refresh)

(uninstall, reinstall, reboot, restart, rename, delete, defrag, format, erase, buy new Mac, buy new Windows machine)

...good times. I wish all web sites could use Microsoft products, forever until long after I’m dead and buried.

Wish I had some screenshots for you, but I must’ve forgot to take some during all my blind Hulk-esque rage.

I’ve left CTV.ca several entries on their FEEDBACK blog, not that it’ll do any good.

Anyway, that fuckin sucked. Time to regroup, and figure the best way to catch up with what I’ve missed.

MS can eat a bullet...right now. In fact, why not make it a Silver Bullet...for all your bullshit Silverlight miserable web content experience needs. Silver would take care of whatever misguided hell-beast that created this chunk of software. Then we could all drink to it's demise.

UPDATE, approx 1 hour later: Ok...I've calmed down, and more importantly, I've got this crap actually working (except in Safari...guess I owe Apple some grief too...on the other hand, if these content creating web sites would use Quicktime/Darwin Streaming Server, I likely wouldn't even be typing about this right now).

Here's a screenshot...this shows Firefox (left) and Internet Explorer (centre) in WinXP in Parallels, and, Firefox 3 in Mac OS X (right), streaming the 2008 NHL Entry Draft live from Ottawa, all at the same time. I win. All the frame rates are smooth, video is very compressed, and the audio is clean. You can even hear famed NHL Commissioner Gary "the blind rat" Bettman getting booed, which is the best part of the whole show of course.


For those keeping score at home: Firefox on the Mac is still using the Flip4Mac plugin, since Silverlight refuses to acknowledge it's installation. When TSN.ca incorrectly mis-identifies that you have not installed Silverlight, they thankfully offer a link to use the older (and much more robust, it even looks better) Windows Media stream, which triggers Flip4Mac, which does actually work, at this point in time.

Firefox and IE are using Silverlight in that screenshot...not the V2 Beta though, use V1. V2 starts to stream, but no video is seen, and no audio is heard...basically you download air. So, to sum up, MS has written an low-performance, unnecessary, platform-specific, media streaming plugin, and sold it to TSN.ca (and CTV.ca) as the future of media streaming. Man, I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in that boardroom meeting..."Hey guys, how can we fuck up the future of online content streaming in Canada? Hmmm, Microsoft has a brand new platform that doesn't work outside of Windows? Where do I sign?!"

If I was that fly, I'd be screaming "NOOOO!" at the top of my fly lungs.

Next step is to try it out in Linux...Gawd help us all.