1. What is SMPTE VC-1?

VC-1 is an industry-standard video format, recognized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and most notably ships in all HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc-certified electronics, hardware, and tools. Windows Media Video 9 (WMV-9) is the Microsoft implementation of the SMPTE VC-1 standard video codec. Microsoft initiated development of the standard with the release of WMV-9 to SMPTE.

2. What kinds of fonts are supported with Silverlight?

Beyond standard and western fonts, Silverlight also supports East Asian characters, double-byte characters, and can work with any East Asian font or Middle Eastern font by using the glyphs element and a supporting TrueType font file that supports the requested glyph.

3. What are the different ways to display text with Silverlight?

Silverlight supports displaying static preformatted text that is comprised out of glyph elements and also dynamic text that uses TextBlock. With glyphs, one needs to position the characters individually while TextBlock supports simple layout.

4. Will Silverlight support all the codecs Windows Media Player supports?

Since Silverlight is a lightweight cross-platform technology, it only carries the most common codecs that are needed for Web playback. However, we are gathering information from customers about the needed codecs and can update Silverlight when necessary.

5. What audio or video formats are supported in Silverlight?

Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio and Video (WMA, WMV7-9) and VC-1, as well as MP3 audio. Additional formats may be available by the final release based on customer feedback.

6. Will Silverlight support HD quality?

Yes, Silverlight supports 720p, HD quality with considerable performance benefits over other solutions. Performance is dependent upon the central processing unit (CPU) capabilities of your computer and configurations. Generally, in testing, a 3-gigahertz (GHz) CPU and/or dual-core support greatly benefit the HD playback experience.

7. What is Storyboard?

Storyboard is a Silverlight class with controls animations with a timeline, and provides object and property targeting information for its child animations

9. What is XAML?

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML, pronounced zammel) is a declarative XML-based language created by Microsoft which is used to initialize structured values and objects.

10. What is the difference between WPF and Silverlight?

Silverlight uses a particular implementation of a XAML parser, with that parser being part of the Silverlight core install. In some cases, the parsing behavior differs from the parsing behavior in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which also has a particular implementation.

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