Microsoft's Silverlight 3 Now Includes H.264/AAC, GPU-Assited Decoding

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It seems the last hold out has finally jumped onto the H.264 bandwagon. Microsoft has its own lineup of video and audio codecs, most notably the WMV and VC-1 types, and for them to embrace H.264 should be seen as the confirmation of H.264 as the industry standard for the next few years at least.

This now means that pretty much all web video will be H.264 based from now on, and in the Blu-ray sector, H.264 will share the spotlight with VC-1 (which is possibly more popular than H.264 at the moment). In portable devices, it's hard to find a phone that doesn't support H.264, most notably the entire iPhone range, plus the iPod (Apple is a big fan of H.264, having been using in in QuickTime HD). In gaming, both the Xbox 360 and PS3 support H.264 playback. And Microsoft's next OS, Windows 7, will also have native support for H.264. Even the DivX codec now supports H.264 playback with encoding coming soon via its acquisition of MainConcept.

More:

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/07/13/...-acceleration/