Moonlight 1.0 Beta w/ Microsoft Media Pack

Miguel de Icaza has today announced the release of Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1. This test release brings in Microsoft Media Pack for playing back video and audio files that is a direct decedent of the decoders found in Silverlight 2.0.

For those unfamiliar with Moonlight, it's a Mono-powered open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, which in turn is a web-browser plug-in that competes with Adobe Flash. Moonlight is a joint project between Novell and Microsoft and was announced last September.

The Moonlight road-map places the final release of Moonlight 1.0 on January 20, 2009. This release should be compatible with the Silverlight 1.0 engine, supports JavaScript, and is compatible with Linux x86 and Linux x86_64. Already in planning for release in September of 2009 is Moonlight 2.0. Moonlight 2.0 will be compatible with Silverlight 2.0 (Microsoft's current stable version), support Microsoft Media Pack 2.0, and better utilize Mono for code execution. The first alpha release of Moonlight 2.0 is expected in March.

For more information on Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1, check out Miguel's blog post.