We are very happy to announce the official CTP of “RadControls for Silverlight” suite. Telerik is the first control vendor to give you a real Silverlight 1.0 controls which you can play with and use in your web pages.
Those of you who signed up through the CTP registration form have already received the bits. For those of you who missed the registration – it is still open.
The controls in the suite target Silverlight version 1.0 Beta. The official version of Silverlight 1.0 is expected this summer.
So what do you need in order to use the controls? Nothing special really - just make sure the following is installed on your machine:
- Silverlight 1.0 plugin which you will be prompted to install if you do not have it. The download size of the plugin is 1.38Mb for Windows. The install is available here.
- ASP.NET Ajax framework which can be installed from here (http://ajax.asp.net/). The download size is 1.4Mb.
The major add-on for this CTP is the RadMediaPlayer control. You can see the online demos here.
Why we have decided to implement a media player control? There are two main reasons behind this decision:
1. This is where the Silverlight technology is strong at the moment. The platform provides a supreme video quality with a minimum required bandwidth thus offering cost-effective and viable video delivery.
2. There are a couple of studies available that show the increasing users demand in providing interactivity in the digital technology market. For a reference you can see this Qualitative study done by RampRate.
RadMediaPlayer control is a fully featured control which tends to deliver a DVD-like user experience. Here is a full list of supported features:
- Support for streaming media
- Variety of media formats , such as (wmv, mp3,…)( full list here)
- Cross-browser, cross platform – based on Silverlight it supports, IE, Firefox, on Mac and Windows. A support for Linux and Opera is coming soon.
- Playlist support
- Watermark support
- Full screen support (+ full video control in full screen mode)
- Chapters support
- ASX files - allowing you to reuse your existing playlist files
- Rich client side API and events
- Skinning – create easily new skins/ modify existing by using the Microsoft Expression Blend. RadMediaPlayer is compatible with the skins exported from the MS Expression Encoder.
Take your time and play with the RadMediaPlayer. Let us know of any feedback you have.