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Moonshine: drinking fermented Windows Media content on Linux

Novell developer Aaron Bockover has created a clever Firefox plugin that uses Moonlight to play conventional Windows media streaming video content at websites like C-SPAN. The plugin takes advantage of the video codecs that Microsoft provides for Moonlight, Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework.

Moonlight 1.0, which was officially released Wednesday, automatically downloads a proprietary codec pack from Microsoft in order to provide Linux users with legally licensed support for Microsoft's video formats. Bockover's plugin uses the NPAPI to register itself as the default consumer of Windows Media content and then, when it is invoked by the browser, uses Moonlight to embed a Silverlight-based streaming video player�which he wrote entirely in XAML and JavaScript�in the page to handle WMV.

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