Microsoft's Silverlight Striking Out On MLB.com

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Microsoft and Major League Baseball (MLB) Advanced Media hooked up in April 2007 to use Silverlight to deliver game video on MLB.com, and until recently, Silverlight was reportedly delivering video streams of 1.2 megabits per second -- the highest available on the service -- without a hitch.

But in the past few months, several subscribers to MLB.com's streaming video service have encountered problems with choppy video performance when using Silverlight to view games, and some angry users have taken to venting their frustrations with Silverlight on the MLB.com support forums.

Representatives from Microsoft and Major League Baseball couldn't be reached for comment.

An MLB.com support representative posting on the forums has offered users several different workarounds to fix the choppy feeds, including: defragmenting hard drives, running spyware scans, and installing the latest version of Autobahn, the software on which NextDef is built.

The MLB.com representative has also repeatedly said the only way to watch the 1.2 megabits per second video feed is with either Mosaic or Silverlight with the NextDef plug-in, an add-on that's designed to optimize video quality and streaming speeds.

But a poster using the handle 'juchmu' claims that Silverlight generates its picture at a lower frame rate than Windows Media Player, and says this is why the latter is currently offering a better viewing experience.

"and#91;Silverlightand#93; is not adjustable and cannot be corrected, therefore the choppiness is not going away. I even tried the beta version of Silverlight 2, and it affords no improvement," the poster wrote.