Technology for Mortals

It appears that YouTube is using Silverlight instead of Flash video for March Madness.  That’s awesome news for netbook owners and lower end computers because Silverlight is so much more CPU friendly than Flash video.  Now if YouTube will convert the rest of the site over, at least for all of the 720P content, that would make the site so much more friendly because flash 720P simply chokes on lower end computers such as netbooks.

This is a good test for a netbook to run to show that 720P Silverlight works on a slow netbook while Adobe Flash 720p will not. Oh and what do you know, this even plays fine in Google Chrome.

This same clip on YouTube in Adobe Flash 720P won’t work on any low end graphics chipset computers which includes the vast majority of netbooks on the market and also many lower end desktop systems with integrated graphics. Try the video below on your netbook or low-end desktop and watch it choke. I can’t even get the supposed hardware accelerated beta 10 Flash player working on netbooks.

The Silverlight clip is encoded with VC-1 compression at 2.25 Mbps and the Youtube version is 2.25 Mbps H.264. Silverlight plays fine on the Asus 1000HE netbook I’m reviewing and that says a lot about the coding efficiency of Microsoft Silverlight. To be more precise, Process Explorer shows that the Silverlight version cost me around 73 billion CPU cycles to play the full clip while the Flash verion cost me around 107 billion CPU cycles. That means 720P Silverlight barely works on netbooks while Adobe flash doesn’t have a chance. Now the Silverlight player still takes twice as much CPU utilization as the native Windows Media player application so it’s as smooth as I’d like it to be, but it could easily be smooth if the video was encoded down to 1024×576 resolution which would be more ideal for 2 Mbps video streams anyways. Maybe the Microsoft team can do some more optimizations to make the Silverlight player closer to Windows Media 11 in terms of performance.

Our fellow blogger Charles Burns asked me if this was due to the different compression algorithm being used (VC-1 versus H.264), and I think that’s part of the reason but not most of the reason. The fact that Silverlight uses VC-1 is a built in advantage, but contrary to popular misconception, netbooks can play 720P H.264 just fine. I’ve done it with as little as 45% CPU utilization on a standard 945-chipset netbook so long as I’m using something good like VLC player. Apple QuickTime player chokes but that’s a whole separate topic. The bottom line here is that Silverlight is CPU/GPU friendly while Flash isn’t.

Larry Seltzer also made a great point to me that Silverlight has been out for 2 years now and there have been no security vulnerabilities it exposes you to unlike Adobe flash which is frequently exposing us to security vulnerabilities. I think this is a clear example of why Silverlight is winning so many customers, and Adobe better do something to optimize their software because netbooks are here to stay and their market share is growing. More and more people will expect to be able to view 720P streaming video on every computer they own and not just their high-end systems.

Here’re a native Windows-only Windows Media Player version that runs on Windows systems running IE, Firefox, or Chrome. It apparently runs about 2x faster than Silverlight and about 3x faster than Flash. If you’re on a netbook or low end desktop, this is the most CPU friendly solution. In fact, it plays with only 42% CPU utilization across both Atom processor threads.