My hopes for MSN SoapBox as a source for silverlight videos are dashed

Last time I wanted to play with using videos as a source for Silverlight media, I found that Silverlight’s “WMV only, thank you” limitation put the kibosh on my plans. YouTube and Yahoo are Flash and at the time Soapbox was password protected. Soapbox’s latest beta removed the permissions requirement on June 1 so I finally found some time today to go digging around to see if I could now use those videos as a source for dynamic embedding in silverlight. I was a little bummed to see that the the videos are also flash. Here’s what you get when you request embed script for a particular video:

<embed src=”http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf” quality=”high” width=”432″ height=”364″ wmode=”transparent” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” flashvars=”c=v&v=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452″ ><embed><br /><a href=”http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452” target=”_new” title=”Microsoft® Silverlight”>Video: Microsoft® Silverlight</a>

Flash flash flash

I tried pasting in the url anyway for the videos just in case, but of course, it doesn’t work.

bah!

Soapbox is still a beta, and does have great features, so hopefully (presumably?) there will be more options in the future.

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