I’m glad to announce the first release of our fully managed Theora audio / video decoder implementation for the Silverlight platform! The Highgate media suite will bring installation-free support for HTML5 streaming video to an additional ~40% of web users overnight.

So, a few drinks will be in order to celebrate the release at the FOSDEM beer event, Friday — drop by! And of course, I’d like to invite anyone excited about making open codecs a first class citizen of the Silverlight / Moonlight ecosystem to visit the Mono dev room over the weekend for source code and some frivolous demos between sessions.

Technology

We’ll be releasing a high-performance decoder for Theora video / Ogg Vorbis audio streams that plugs into the Silverlight 3 streaming media abstraction, as well as a reference front-end player interface and JavaScript bridge layer providing basic compatibility with standard HTML5 media tags, adding support for the standard to Internet Explorer and extending the capabilities of WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Epiphany. A cunning plan, one might say!