McRip System Files is a free portable offline installer for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, DirectX Redistributable, Shockwave Player and Java. Offline means that the program contains all installers for offline installation. In other words, an Internet connection is not required during installation of the technologies.

The downside is the size of the installer, which is currently weighing in at 192 Megabytes. This can be an issue, especially for users who do not need all of the applications but only some of them.

Just start the installer to install one, multiple or all of the programs on a target system.

Checkboxes allow you to make selections prior to installation. Please note that 32-bit and 64-bit installation files are available. It should also be noted that the developers have added the latest Flash beta version to the program and not the latest stable version of Adobe’s software.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 users need to run the program with elevated privileges. All selected applications will be installed silently on the system and with automatic updates disabled. Users who want automatic updating enabled need to configure the programs accordingly.

System Files can be a useful program for users who need offline installers for multiple of the included programs. Silent installation of all programs and disabled auto updates may be interesting as well.

Windows users can download the program from Softpedia. The developer website is available here.

Silverlight 5 now could be the last version of the technology that gets released. The new version is available for download for all support platforms (all Windows operating systems from Windows XP SP3 and higher and Intel based Mac OS X 10.5.7 or higher) and web browsers (Internet Explorer 6 and higher, Firefox 3.6 and higher, Safari 4 and higher, Google Chrome 12 and higher). Opera is not listed on the compatibility page even though it is compatible with Silverlight. Other browsers may also be compatible even though they are not listed.

Visit the Silverlight getting started page for information about the installed Silverlight installation on your system, the system requirement chart, instructions on how to uninstall Silverlight and download links pointing to the latest version of the application.

Users can download and install the new version of Silverlight. Browsers that are open during installation need to be closed and reopened before they recognize the new plugin version automatically.

So what is new in Silverlight 5? The announcement over at the Silverlight blog highlights the following changes:

New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.

In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight.

Here is a video highlighting new features and changes in Silverlight 5.

Additional information about Silverlight are available at the official website over at Microsoft. (via Mike)

Up until recently Docs had several disadvantages in comparison to its main competitor Google Docs. It was for instance not possible to upload and read pdf documents.

Yesterday’s announcement at the Docs blog revealed several feature additions to Docs.com, among them support for PDF files. Docs users can now upload pdf documents to Docs to read and share them online.

But, this only works on computer systems with Sliverlight 4 installed. If you never heard of it, Silverlight is Microsoft’s Flash competitor. Interested users who want to get an impression of the rendering quality can take a look at this example pdf document at Docs.

Silverlight is currently only officially available for Mac and PC, which means that Linux users will not be able to to use the pdf reading part of the service. (maybe it is possible with Mono or another project, let us know)

But pdf document support is not the only new feature of Docs.com. The Docs search has been revamped, now offering full text search with a social component. Social component, huh? Remember the news that Bing has started to integrate social elements into their search engine? That you for instance see movie likes of your friends if you search for movies?

This is apparently something similar, probably using much of the same technology. But first things first.

The full text search is now able to find the search phrase in documents and tags. Previously, Docs search was only matching tags with the search phrase. A big improvement.

The social component is integrated into the document ranking algorithm. Docs.com uses social criteria, like the searchers relationship with authors or the number of likes of a document, to rank documents in the search results.

Another addition is the user-generated templates feature. This allows friends to copy a document to their space, and edit it there, instead of allowing them to edit the document in your space.

Now, in the new ‘advanced options’ section of the sharing control you may specify if “Viewers can use the doc as a template.” If you select this option, your friends can make their own copy with a single click.

Lastly, Docs.com is now making use of a bulk Silverlight document uploader. Users can now upload multiple documents at once by dragging and dropping them on the uploader. This feature again is only available to Silverlight 4 users.

You can read the full announcement here or visit Docs right away.

Eight sessions are displayed per page. Each contains a title and short description. A tag cloud can also be used to display only sessions about a certain topic to narrow down the results. Some sessions contained information about new products that have since been mentioned on several news sites including the official release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, an overview of Windows Mobile 6.5 or the Microsoft Translator Widget which makes use of Ajax to translate a website on the fly without having to reload most of the contents.

Still, most of the sessions are only interesting for web developers who use those technologies as they tend to get technical pretty soon.

Play times vary widely from session to session but usually range between 20 and 80 minutes.

ITV Player uses Microsoft’s Silverlight format to stream its media, which allows it to be played on Windows and Macs. Users report problems with it working under the Linux build of Silverlight. The website itself looks quite slick but is nowhere as near as nice to use as BBC’s iPlayer.

The service allows users to watch shows like Coronation Street but I cannot see any way to download these episodes to watch portably as you can with iPlayer.

Whilst it’s nice to see ITV using a non-Windows only brand (unlike Channel 4), it would have been good had they used a more universal format like Flash or OGG.

There are a few other issues with it. Many shows can’t be watch live due to licensing issues, the video is too small and the only options are small or fullscreen – unlike iPlayer. ITV Player also fails to offer HD shows.

I think ITV Player will either be drastically improved or scrapped! I’m surprised ITV are in-touch enough with the public to stay clear of DRM but I’m disappointed they used Silverlight and made it incompatible with Linux. The interface needs work too.

I expect the site won’t work outside the UK but it’s still a convenient service British readers may have overlooked. If it does work outside, please comment and let us know!

The requirements for Livestation are Windows XP Service Pack 2 or newer, which includes Windows Vista, and Microsoft Silverlight. A version for Apple Macintosh computers is currently developed. After some serious troubles with getting Microsoft Silverlight to install (it was working in Firefox and prompting me for installation in Internet Explorer all the time) I was able to get a look at the current version of Livestation.

Livestation is currently offering nine TV stations and one Radio station that are streamed live to the users computer. I did experience some connection problems which was very unfortunate but not a huge problem if you consider that this is a beta and not the release version.

The nine TV channels are:

Al Jazeera (English)
BBC World
BBC World Service
Bloomberg Television
Euronews (English)
Euronews (French)
France 24 (English)
France 24 (French)
Sky News

And the single Radio Station is BBC Radio 4. Not all stations are available for all users however. Some stations are only available in certain countries, for example BBC News 24 is only available in the United Kingdom and users from other countries are not seeing that channel at all.

The quality of the stream is extremely nice, much better quality than you can expect from those P2P clients like TVU Player and even Joost. The real drawback currently is the lack of channels but that is understandable if you consider that this is a technical release and not a public release.

Controls are non existing, almost at least and the interface of say Joost is much nicer than that of Livestation. I however prefer the minimalistic approach, I don’t want to write comments or chat with other users while watching TV.

Livestation is very promising and if they manage to convince more TV stations it could be comparable to Zattoo which is already live in several countries. In terms of video quality it exceeds it already.