To see fantastic online video of the Olympics, go to NBCOlympics.com. But you'd better be on a PC or newer Mac and have Silverlight 2 onboard, because NBC and Microsoft have shut out some Mac and Linux users.

In a slap to the Olympic ideal of everyone playing by the same rules, NBC and Microsoft have essentially said to some Mac owners and Linux users: you can't play.

The L.A. Times Web Scout blog explains:

Apple computers more than a couple of years old -- including all iBooks and PowerBooks as well as some iMacs and Mac minis -- will not run Silverlight 2, the software underlying NBC's Olympics player. And computers running the Linux operating system -- an open-source alternative to Windows -- were also left out of the mix. When unlucky users try to fire up the video player to catch a few rounds of pingpong, they'll instead be greeted by a screenful of technical requirements that their computer doesn't meet.

I used the player to watch the opening minutes of Cameroon vs. South Korea's Red Devil Army (their name -- not mine) in men's soccer, and the picture quality was outstanding, even on my IBM ThinkPad, and to a lesser degree, my second display, a Samsung SyncMaster 172N. Picture quality was best on my iMac running OS X, though the maximum screen size was smaller than I wished.

The player's features are a nice plus. You can

• Choose highlights from the most-watched tab -- the thrilling men's 4 x 100m free relay (swimming) is currently in the top spot


• Watch clips that were aired on NBC, (organized a bit clunkily by day)


• Search by individual sports, and select a second event via a picture-in-picture thumbnail, and


• Stream up to four events at once in the "Live" control room. (Pssst ... They're not all live.)

Watch Eric Schmidt, director of media and advertising evangelism at Microsoft, explain the technology used to build NBC's video player in this video interview with Robert Scoble: