Today at the Silverlight FireStarter event we unveiled the next release of Silverlight.

Silverlight 5 adds significant new features and capabilities, and enables developers to create premium media experiences and deliver rich applications across browsers, desktops and devices. In my keynote this morning we demonstrated a number of them, and highlighted both the developer productivity Silverlight 5 provides and the great new user experiences it enables.  You can watch my keynote here.

A Silverlight 5 beta will be available in the first half of next year, and the final release will ship in the second half of 2011.

Some major features

• Hardware video decode: Silverlight 5 now supports GPU accelerated video decode, which significantly reduces CPU load for HD video.  Using Silverlight 5, even low powered Netbooks will be able to play back 1080p HD content
• Trickplay: Silverlight 5 now enables variable speed playback of media content on the client with automatic audio pitch correction. This is great for training videos where you want to speed up the trainer while still understanding what he’s saying
• Improved power awareness will prevent screensavers from kicking in while you’re watching movies while allowing the computer to sleep when video is not playing.
• Remote-control support is now built-into Silverlight 5 - allowing users to control media playback with remote control devices.

Full Story Here

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