Monthly Archives: September 2009

Opera 10 and the Microsoft Silverlight plugin

Just in case anyone is wondering…

If you don't know, SilverLight is the Microsoft answer to Flash.
If there's some website that has videos or other content that you want to see but they chose to use SilverLight, not all hope is lost.

Just go to the download page for the SilverLight plugin. If you are using Opera, it will tell you that "This browser is not supported blah blah blah…".

Ignore that bullshit and just download it. Then close Opera and install it.
Be sure to remove any pre-existing version first, or it won't work.

After the installation takes place, reopen Opera and go to the plugins page. You should see the SilverLight plugin already enabled. Congratulations, and welcome to the fantastic world of SilverLight content. :-|

YouTube is implementing OEmbed

That's good news. For once, we were faster than YouTube to implement something :-)
Anyway, if you look at any video page source code, you will find something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=json" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=xml" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />

And, by looking at one of these URLs, for example the JSON one, you can see:

{
  "provider_url": "http://www.youtube.com/",
  "title": "Dramatic Chipmunk",
  "html": "<object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>",
  "author_name": "cregets",
  "height": 313,
  "width": 384,
  "version": "1.0",
  "author_url": "http://www.youtube.com/user/cregets",
  "provider_name": "YouTube",
  "type": "video"
}

So, from now on, you don't have to guess what's the HTML code to correctly embed a YouTube video (like we on My Opera did for the Embed Video button on the new blog post form, but you have the full, and always updated, HTML code in the OEmbed JSON content.

Nice, I think.