Much has been made of our making the Mac a first-class citizen of Silverlight. We build the Mac and Windows versions together, and release them simultaneously. We've intentionally structured Silverlight to minimize dependencies on the underlying hardware and OS, and carry around all our codecs inside the runtime.
What I haven't talked a whole lot about in too long is our support for authoring Silverlight video experiences on the Mac. While our own Expression Encoder 2 is Windows-only, we work with partners to provide WMV and VC-1 encoding on other platform. Telestream has been a great partner here, with their Flip4Mac QuickTime component and their Episode stand-alone compression tool (originally known as Compression Master, and which came along with their acquisition of Popwire).
Flip4Mac is a testament to both the portability of the Windows Media technologies and the flexibility of Apple's QuickTime architecture. It works as a QuickTime component, enabling QuickTime to play Windows Media content like any other supported format, with full access to all of QuickTime's features like hardware accelerated full-screen playback (all supported in the free version). For example, in the QuickTime Pro Properties window:
Looks just like any other QuickTime file. Even the ASF metadata shows up.
Flip4Mac also supports content authoring in the paid version, as well as import into content creation apps like Final Cut Pro. It's got pretty deep control, even exposing features like B-Frames that'd take a registry key with Windows Media Encoder.
So, how about a quick walkthrough through the Flip4Mac encoding settings?
Flip4Mac is accessed like any other exportable format from QuickTime (like MPEG-4). It also comes with a bunch of presets for typical scenarios.
It has the normal set of basic video export features you'd expect, nicely Macified. I appreciate the "Size: Current" so I don't have to always type in the frame size of the source when I'm not scaling.
The Advanced button reveals some deeper options, including a complexity control for speed/quality tradeoffs and B-Frame distance. You can also set Flip4Mac to deinterlace interlaced sources, or pass interlacing on through to the final encode. Since it can both encode and decode interlaced VC-1, Flip4Mac can be a great way to transfer editable 480i video sources over slow connections. It can match DV quality in 20% the data rate.
For Silverlight audio, Flip4Mac supports both WMA 9 Standard and 9 Professional. It doesn't encode the 32-96 Kbps WMA 10 Pro low bitrate modes that Silverlight 2 will be able to decode, but does have the full variety of WMA encoding modes.
And the coolest new feature of Flip4Mac: built-in Silverlight templates! This lets you build a complete Silverlight player (using Expression Encoder templates we provided) directly from any app that support QuickTime export.
