Yesterday at the Silverlight FireStarter Event Scott Guthrie announced Silverlight 5. Not as in “It’s here now, go get it!”, but announced as in telling that a Silverlight 5 beta will be available in the first half of next year, and that he final release will ship in the second half of 2011. Of course the new release was shown off in the keynote too.
Silverlight 5 will enable media experiences to go even further by adding:
- Hardware video decode: Silverlight 5 now supports GPU accelerated video decode, which significantly reduces CPU load for HD video. Using Silverlight 5, even low powered Netbooks will be able to play back 1080p HD content
- TrickPlay: Silverlight 5 now enables variable speed playback of media content on the client with automatic audio pitch correction. This is great for training videos where you want to speed up the trainer while still understanding what he’s saying
- Improved power awareness will prevent screensavers from kicking in while you’re watching movies while allowing the computer to sleep when video is not playing.
- Remote-control support is now built-into Silverlight 5 – allowing users to control media playback with remote control devices.
Silverlight 5 also delivers significant improvements for application development. More about that can be found in Scott Guthrie’s blog post. Ohh, and don’t forget to check out the website too!
If you want to watch the keynote and the entire day’s recording on demand, head on over to http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter