I installed Silverlight 2 beta last night hoping to check out some videos on nbcolympics.com.  While I can watch the videos in standard and enhanced mode, there is no option for a full-screen mode.

I notice that on other silverlight videos spread throughout the web, a full-screen button is available as an option, however with the NBC olympics feed this is not the case. I'm rather surprised because Silverlight is advertised all over the place as being full-screen capable, and one would figure that for the Olympics this would definitaley be ready as it is really a time for Silverlight to shine on the world-stage for this big event.

 Will full-screen functionality be enabled before the start of the opening ceremonies tomorrow?

 I second this question. I was amazed and thought it was pretty stupid when I tried it out the other day and found no way to go full screen. I'm sure there is some marketing crap forcing them to disable it so you have to stare at the advertisements on the screen the entire time you're watching. I'll likely try downloading tvtonic and seeing how its coverage is since it allows full screen.

whew. I'm glad it wasn't just me having this issue. And thank you for mentioning TVtonic. I'm going to download the client and give it a shot.

Is there ANYONE from the silverlight team that can answer our question about full-screen mode?

Thanks for the clarification Tom. The nbc site has come up well. cheers [:) ]

Thanks
Rajesh Shirpuram

(If this has answered your question, please click on "mark as answer" on this post. Thank you!)

Well Duh. But why is there no full screen mode button?

 I have been thrilled with the setup of the nbcolympics website.  However, the lack of a full screen view is AWFUL!!  I can't even think of a player that doesn't include a full screen mode!  Microsoft wake up this just makes silverlight look awful and out dated. If it's about ads just use in video ads like Joost, youtube, or other sites.  A lack of full screen mode does not reflect well on your player.  I can't believe this!!!  The lack of a full screen mode is ruining what otherwise would be a 10 out of 10 experience and making it completly average!

    -- An "enhanced playback mode" powered by Silverlight that gives users the
       choice of a high-quality full screen viewing experience that is as good
       or better than anything on the Internet today

What I am watching is not "Full Screen" and IS very disappointing after what was promised.  Come on you can do better!

At least stick to you word, have some sense of honor or publish why it is not possible, don't make yourselves look bad with

a really great product.... and please again, the product is good, just not what you promised, and the lack of full screen 

detracts, challenge from your developers all the way to Mr. Gates and Mr. Zenkel to watch it for awhile and say that 

this is what was promised... 

I'm with you Fever. Lack of full-screen mode on the nbcolympics site is just incredibly stupid if you ask me. It makes Silverlight as usable as Realplayer was in 1999. This has to be another bozo decision from some higher-up executive in NBC and/or Microsoft.

Microsoft's Silverlight looks like a complete mess now, way to go! This is the perfect way to showcase your product!

And Microsoft wants this to compete with Flash? Give me a break. 

Yes Tom,

 Can you comment on why full screen mode was promised but not delivered?

Thanks
 

macman4000:

Yes Tom,

 Can you comment on why full screen mode was promised but not delivered?

Thanks

I can. I was actually heavily involved in this decision. I'll put together a post explaining in detail why we made some of the decisions we did around fullscreen.

- Tom

    Tom Taylor    |    Microsoft Silverlight

Well, I just signed up to tell you what a stupid, horrible bad decision it was, and it completely ruined the experience of watching the Olympic games online. Thanks Tom. If I want to take it full screen that should be my choice, not a design decision on your end. This basic functionality should be enabled and embedded into the player by default. I installed silverlight for the Olympics, when the Olympics are over I'm getting rid of it.

I'd be happy to access a teeny screen.  I can't.

 I can't imagine why. Go to YouTube.com and search for Olympics. In fact, search for nbcolympics.com. Full screen videos of all of the events. You don't need silverlight to see the Olympics online, thankfully. Installed and uninstalled in just a couple hours. Good job Tom and the rest of the idiots involved.

I just signed up to express my total disbelieve as well. I watched a pre-release demo of a system at NAB conference in Vegas. Silverlight team put so much pressure to deliver best experience possible and it supposed to be THE showcase of technology. I can not believe you could ruin it that much ! Your decision to strip out full screen capability degrades the experience so considerably that I suspect after people realize the shorcoming, you won't even have a bandwidth problem running at 10% of targeted reach. Talking about money well spent ! I really really ruins it no matter what arguments you are going to come up with. It's like having a ferrari with fiat engine. You've put so much money and development effort to enable four streams at the same time, but yet you fail to deliver even one in its glory. What's the point ?! People expect certain things in 2008. Greatest video content delivery attempt in the history without the very basic feature we use and love for years ?  This sheds bad light for silverlight itself  ..  Just my 2 cents.

I wonder if there is any software out there that could crop and magnify the portion of video in real time. I couldn't find any though.

I am working on putting together the post for you guys to provide details - give me thirty minutes - I definitely understand the frustration for folks with large monitors & am more than willing to discuss this privately.

Feel free to discuss it privately! I'm looking forward to hearing from you! I do hope you will include instructions on how I may view this material the way I would like to .. full screen! Thank You.

I have to be honest, I don't care what the reasoning was behind this, I think it was a horrible choice! The functionality exists in the player and it should be here for what is apparently it's showcase event. You guys screwed up doing this!

I'm glad you mentioned large monitors. I'm running a 22" widescreen at 1680x1050. Standard video at the site is 3.5" by 2" About the size of a pack of cigarettes. Is this the awesome experience of Silverlight I was missing out on? Ok let me go to "enhanced" version. WOW! 9.5" by 5.5"

Awesome. With my eyes 3 feet from my monitor it looks like .. maybe the size of a small paperback book. No wonder I never heard of this garbage. These are the 2008 Olympics, not some dude posting a video of his cute kitten.

 

 I just tried resized the video in FireFox3 and zoomed in. Works great on my MAC and my buddy tried it on his PC and that works too. Almost full screen if you get rid of the google toolbar and the other stuff.

 - MadMike

 I also tried it on my gf windows pc - didn't work in FireFox 2 but did when we installed FireFox 3 - the video looks great at that size. Man I can't wait for 2010 olympics when we allget HD video

MadMike

Still waiting for that post from the Silverlight team... Really disappointing, considering all the hype....

Mike Henley:

 I also tried it on my gf windows pc - didn't work in FireFox 2 but did when we installed FireFox 3 - the video looks great at that size. Man I can't wait for 2010 olympics when we allget HD video

Interesting. It looks like Firefox 3 does their zooming differently than Internet Explorer - looks like they scale individual elements rather than blowing the final picture up.

As for an explanation of why there is no true "full screen" mode: I think it's important for people to understand that this is an extremely large and complex project, and we are delivering an incredible amount of content to end users. The Olympics have very broad appeal across a wide range of people and computers, and therefore it's critical that the experience is accessible to as broad of an audience as possible. That means understanding the range of users, computers, monitors, broadband quality, etc. We didn't optimize for the lowest common denominator (e.g. you need to have at least 512k of bandwidth for a good experience on the site), but we did try to focus on targeting as many users as possible. The logisitics of streaming live video from Beijing to New York are substantial - doing this for up to thirty-three live streams at once + commentary is incredible and there are many, many tradeoffs tht must be made along the way.

If I were you, I would be thinking, "'the range of users, computers, monitors, broadband' includes people like me with a new-ish computer and a larger monitor." Yep, you're absolutely right. We had to make a decision on which to optimize for first, and that was for as many users as possible to be able to access the site. Some folks aren't able to see the site due to bandwidth restrictions or because they have older machines. That sucks, but it was a tradeoff that we had to make. We also had to make a tradeoff at the high end, since we spent most of our time focusing on the broad consumer experience first.

Again, if I were you, I would also be thinking, "yes, but it's not really that hard to do full screen video in Silverlight. Why didn't you just make a simple full screen mode?" Again, this was a judgement call based on the fact that once you add in browser chrome and the rest of the page, most people can't actually view a video size beyond the current enhanced mode, which is 848x480. Most people have 1024x768 monitors or less. There's also a quality issue for stretching video that far - the live feeds are 650k, which look incredible for most people, but not if you scale it up to a 30" monitor. The encore and highlight content peaks at 1.5mb, which does look much better if stretched that far, but again, we're trying to provide a good experience for all users.

I heard from a few folks that there's a rumor floating around right now: that we (Microsoft) or they (NBC) made a decision to do this because we didn't want the end product to look "too good". I can guarantee you that this is absolutely false. We all want to be able to push above and beyond anything that's ever been accomplished before - this was simply a decision that we made due to the different tradeoffs that must be made for a project like this. Yes, the 2010 Vancouver Olympics will be even better in terms of online video delivery, and London in 2012 will absolutely blow everybody's minds. The internet video and media industries are innovating rapidly and we intend to help push things forward as much and as fast as we can.

So that's the explanation. If you aren't satisfied and you think I'm an idiot or that we didn't care about fulfilling any promises that were made, that's OK. I'm really not offended, because I absolutely understand where you are coming from. Feel free to send me a private message and I'd be absolutely happy to hear your concerns.

In the meantime, try the Firefox 3 zoom approach described above - this actually worked really well for me on my Mac. It's not true full-screen mode, but I was able to get most of the browser chrome removed, resize the window to fill the screen, and then press [command]+ to zoom up to the point where the video filled most of the screen. I think that Firefox 3 on the PC has a F11 full screen mode as well, which would allow you to remove almost all of the chrome and zoom even larger. This will look best with Encore and Highlight content because it's higher-quality content.

thanks for listening so far,

- Tom

Tom Taylor    |    Microsoft Silverlight

Agreed. I mean "I can" understand where you're coming from. 848x480 .. still trying to digest that. But when 30 min =  3 hours .. it's no wonder there's a huge disconnect. It's kind of funny in a way. To go through all this effort to create this huge disappointment. Over one feature which should have been basic.  If you do some basic searches you'll see this isn't the only site people are expressing their anger over this.

Honestly I never heard of Silverblight before this and I'll be glad to never hear of it again.

No problems with Flash. Thanks Adobe!
 

 So .. "blah blah blah WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT" ..

USE THE SUGGESTION / WORK AROUND WE DIDN'T ANTICIPATE (that was posted by someone else) AND SEE IF THAT MAYBE WORKS FOR YOU. IT'S A SHOCK TO US! 

Oh, also COMPUTERS ARE COMPLICATED! We're just Microsoft, cut us a BREAK .. geez. We're tryin folks. IT'S COMPLEX. THAT'S HOW WE SOLD IT TO NBC AND THEN ASKED OURSELVES LATER IF WE COULD EVEN DO IT! lol (we couldn't)

ashes2flames:

USE THE SUGGESTION / WORK AROUND WE DIDN'T ANTICIPATE (that was posted by someone else) AND SEE IF THAT MAYBE WORKS FOR YOU. IT'S A SHOCK TO US! 

Did you try this workaround? Like I said, I tried it out as well and it seems to work.

Why are you even suggesting it? Won't it ruin the design dream? Won't I have tearing and pixels? The fact that you suggest I even try is the exact SAME reason why the choice should be there in the player inherently.

I run FireFox2 and I don't plan on upgrading to 3 before the Olympics are out. I shouldn't have to. Your product is supposed to work correctly on this platform.  You, obviously, get to enjoy the full screen video that was promised to every fan of the Olympic games by your own press. By using a work around posted here by people who are angry at the STUPID design decisions you made for this project.

At some point you need to grasp reality. 30" monitors are not the high end average. Their not even a high end DREAM for most people. 1024x768 WAS the avg. maybe 5 Years ago. Dell drops 20" widescreen monitors onto $500. computers for YEARS AND YEARS now.

In any event .. your world wide demonstration has served one purpose .. SilverBLIGHT is not ready to scale to meet the needs of consumers, when the big event hit .. people wanted to consume it in full screen .. and your product was a worldwide failure. At any resolution that matters.

 
IT IS ONE LINE OF CODE TO ALLOW FULL SCREEN.

Just do it.
 

I am suggesting the workaround because larger video seemed to be what you were interested in getting, and this seems like a pretty good way to do it. If you're in interested in having a separate discussion about how we brought this project to market or what constitutes a typical consumer PC, then It seems to me that we should have a separate thread on this. If you want to send me a private mail with your contact info then I'll even call you and I can answer your questions over the phone.

thanks!

- Tom

You can put your phone number here and I'll call it. You can send it privately if you like, also.

What about these workarounds:

Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = True
-----
VB.NET
Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = Not Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen
-----
C#
Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen != Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen;
-----

Any of that help?

Also, not for nothing, but YOU are the one who brought up the avg PC experience here. And you are also the one who said YOU would make a separate post explaining the (terrible) decision to not allow full screen for this. Also, are you suggesting that FireFox 3 is the browser of choice if one wants to get the FULL experience at nbcolympics.com?

ashes2flames and I talked on the phone. I don't think that we came to an agreement on this but we do appreciate the feedback & I understand his frustration. No, I don't normally ask people to call me to discuss forum postings.

One thing that was brought up in the call that I didn't mention in my post above. There are actually two reasons why we don't do true full screen mode for this player:

1.) the player was designed and built to target the broadest range of consumers possible first and foremost - that was my point above.
2.) there are some restrictions placed on the usage of full screen video by the IOC. That also factored into the design of this video player.

thanks!

- Tom

Tom Taylor    |    Microsoft Silverlight

I will say, Tom is a great guy and a credit to the team as far as public relations goes, just ridiculous how honest and forthright/giving he was. All that praise aside, I still disagree with the design choices made for this project in regards to it's full screen application, and there were no technological obstacles explained to me that prevented them from providing a full screen experience to those people who wanted it / with systems that could handle it. The choice should have been there for the consumer IMO.

The Silverlight's player's functionality will not be changing for NBCOlympics.com so, as far as I'm concerned, I got to say my peace and I'm done.

Thanks Tom. 

I signed up to say thanks for bringing us the online olympics for FREE. I don't have cable and I watch it on a 15.4" laptop anyway.

I was looking for a full screen solution, but I can live with the enhanced version.

It's free and the quality is good, so I am not complaining. I d rather have it running smoothly on a smaller screen, instead of a lagging, server time-out full screen.

Not a lot of people have a 24+"LCD, and if you do, you should try lower your resolution, firefox zoomin, tvtonics, or watch it on a laptop?

The silverlight is not a TV substition. 

Your day to shine only shows off an extremely gimped, unimpressive player that's basically worthless in my opinion. Enhanced mode? Control center with 3 PIP screens that are so small that they look like postage stamps with tiny animations!? Hello? Silverlight team, don't you realize this whole setup is a complete joke? 

Tom,

First question: After the stream has reached the end computer can Silverlight stretch the stream to fit the screen? If Silverlight can stretch the stream then I'd expect the video quality to be degraded and I'd also expect Silverlight to make a best effort at maintaining quality. I'd also expect Silverlight to cope with screen sizes and resolutions automatically. And Tom, this is not a question just for the Olympics -- it just a question in general. It's also not a political question (i.e. NBC won't let us or whatever) it's a technical question. If we assume no political obstacles then can Silverlight make a best effort to stretch any video stream to fullscreen? These are questions folks will ask when evaluating whether or not to adopt Silverlight over Flash. For the others who are reading this thread: Does Flash offer this functionality? I'd assume yes.

Second question: Assuming Silverlight can make a best effort to stretch any quality stream to full screen while gracefully handling any screen size and resolution then how much coding effort is required to do this and offer the end users this functionality via a button on the player? Is it one line of code? (I'd actually expect that it'd be more than just a bit flip to enable. I wouldn't be surprised if I, as the developer, had to specify letterbox, stretch to fit, zoom-in, etc. E.g. all the same options offered by an widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio TV when it's displaying a stream coming in at a 3:4 aspect ratio.) Again this is not a political question but a technical one and one which will be asked when considering Silverlight against Flash. The preferable form of an answer to this question would be a link to the MSDN docs. This way those of us considering adopting Silveright will know, authoritative