Moonlight

I first stumbled across Moonlight while looking for a way to watch Netflix Instant Streaming in Ubuntu. Let me first begin this post by elaborating on that: Moonlight will not play anything from Netflix, as it is all DRM’d. The cool thing, though, is that the Moonlight developers are working alongside Microsoft, so emplementation of the DRM system could actually be a possibility in the future.

I hate Flash almost as much as child molesters and people who talk at the theater (points if you get the Firefly reference). It’s a resource hog, it’s buggy, and it’s just all around garbage. Not to mention how proprietary it is.

And I certainly hate the idea that someone should develop a different, equally-as-proprietary system that is, overall, just as bad as the first, and serves the exact same purpose.

But really, all of my hatred is towards Flash and Silverlight and has nothing to do with Moonlight itself. The actual plug-in works surprisingly well, and I can’t complain. It’s one of the nicest and most professional open-source projects currently going on, in my opinion. The bottom-line, though, is that while Moonlight works, I almost never see an implementation of Silverlight. And the one I do, being Netflix, simply won’t work with Moonlight. So here’s my official stance: if you need it, you couldn’t find any better. If you don’t have a need for it, though, save the bandwidth for later.

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