As with the last Olympics, NBC has once again chosen Silverlight as the technology for streaming video. Since Silverlight is a Microsoft technology, Windows user only needs to download the plugin and get on their way. For Linux users, it can be a bit more complicated.

Fortunately, Silverlight has existed in the form of Moonlight for the last couple of years and a version compatible with the NBC Silverlight player was released just in time for the Olympics.

In my case, I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit. The Firefox plugin can be downloaded here:

http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/prerelease.aspx

For some reason, after download and installation, it still wouldn’t work for me but this tip from the Mono support forums helped:

Try deleting your pluginreg.dat file (in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/pluginreg.dat, close firefox first), then restart firefox.

Once I did this, the plugin worked as it should…now, if NBC could only get their act together and actually deliver the videos to actually play without errors.