I wanted to see the Bob Costas/Stephen Colbert interview from Vancouver, but the NBC Olympics website required Microsoft’s Silverlight in order to watch the videos. Well, I don’t use Windows as my regular desktop, I use Linux. A friend showed me how to use Moonlight, which is an open source implementation of Silverlight. The Ubuntu Guide has a nice entry on their wiki how you can get Moonlight running on Ubuntu using Mozilla Firefox. However, there’s been some updates that needed to be made to the latest pre-release of the Moonlight plugin in order to get it working with the NBC Olympics videos. There’s even a specific section in the wiki that references the streaming Olympic coverage on NBC. From the Wiki:
- The Novell Mono project has been working overtime to bring an alpha version of Moonlight 3 (compatible with Silverlight 3), with which the streaming video of the Olympics (by NBC and CTV) can be viewed. This works successfully for me. The Moonlight project warns that not all security gaps have been tested, so it should be used in a limited fashion. Nevertheless, my viewing of the Olympics (I am in the US so can only access NBC, since CTV is blocked in the US) is equal using this plugin (with Firefox in Linux) to my viewing using Silverlight in Windows. Download the Moonlight 2.99 plugin here.
To get this working, I downloaded the latest pre-release here. Restart Firefox and you should be all set.
NOTE: If you installed the plugin from the apt repository, you may need to remove it. When I had the apt plugin and the pre-release plugin both installed, I couldn’t view the Silverlight videos correctly.
And there you go! You can watch the Olympics from Firefox on Ubuntu!
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