Yesterday I followed a link from Duncan Campbell’s Reg article on the joint parliamentary committee’s scrutiny of the Communications Data Bill referred to in my post below. That link took me to the UK Parliamentary website which I confess I haven’t visited in a while. I was initially irritated that the video format used on that site used Microsoft Windows Media for both video and audio. This meant that I would need to use either Windows Media Player, or install Microsoft silverlight, which is sort of tricky on non-Microsoft platforms. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Parliamentary authorities recognised that some viewers would be using such platforms. The page including the embedded video referred specifically to the fact that the video required the use of Microsoft Silverlight or Microsoft Media Player and pointed non-Microsoft users to their help page. That page in turn points Linux users to the Novell Moonlight site where they can obtain the open source implementation of Microsoft’s silverlight.
Now much as I might deplore the use of proprietary software (and related codecs) on a site such as the UK Parliament’s, they are to be congratulated in actually recognising that there are viewers who will not be using Microsoft products and in providing pointers to alternatives (even if the debian purists will still be excluded).
Interesting video nonetheless. Worth watching.