We are getting ready for our first beta of Moonlight 1.0, which will map to Silverlight 1.0, you have a few options to get it running:
(a) Wait until our official Beta launch, and it will contain an easy-to-install plugin. Click install, restart browser, you are done.
(b) You can use it today if you build from our source code, it is published here: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
(c) Repositories like Packman have RPMs that you can install for various distributions that you can install today.
We will be using Microsoft's Media Pack for Linux, which is a licensed version of the media codecs, binary drivers provided by Microsoft. This has the advantage that the media companies that own the patents on codecs have been paid for (MPEG-LA consortium and others).
For those of you that live in a country where software/machine patents are not enforced (media patents are enforced in Europe, contrary to popular lore) or those that just want to stick it to the man, you can build Moonlight with the open source FFMPEG media codecs.
Support for Silverlight 2.0 will ship in preview form in December.
Writing it in Java does have some advantages. One is that you can use the same code on a few popular platforms. Think about what that means to maintainability.
Please stop advocating this as an advantage, its exactly the opposite.
This is a advantage for the developer. For the users this is a clear disadvantage: It will never integrate as well into their platform as a native solution would. You might as well put on your projects web page that you care jack about your users.
Code is portable, User interfaces aren't. Take a hint from skype, implement your application in whatever language you please as a library and then make GUI's with the platforms native or best widget set. In their case that was C for the core and C++ QT, Delphi VLC and Obj-C Cocoa for linux, windows and mac respectively.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion