[Swfdec] Proposal: swfdec-gnome

[Benjamin Otte]

Hi,

I'd like to propose swfdec-gnome for inclusion into the GNOME 2.22
desktop. Swfdec-gnome is a recent addition to the Swfdec project [1].
Its purpose is integration of Flash files into the Gnome desktop. It
currently provides a thumbnailer and a playback application for local
files similar to the stand-alone application Adobe ships on Windows.
It is supposed to replace the support that is currently provided via
the Swfdec 0.3 GStreamer plugin/Totem.

This would of course add an external dependency on the Swfdec library.
The Swfdec library itself does not depend on anything that is not
already part of Gnome. In fact, it uses Glib, Cairo, Pango and Gtk
plus optional dependencies on GStreamer/FFmpeg/Mad for video/audio
decoding and ALSA/OSS for audio playback.

Currently swfdec-gnome is hosted in our git repo on Freedesktop and
uses its bugtracker, but I would prefer moving it to Gnome SVN and
using its bugtracker for ease of integration with the Gnome project.
This should also not be a problem because almost all developers of
Swfdec are already Gnome developers.

On to some Q/A for questions I imagine you people asking:

Do you really think Swfdec is mature enough to be used as an Adobe
Flash substitute?
I would be very (some say overly) careful about making that statement.
However, this proposal is not about a substitute for the Flash player
in your browser. It is about better support for the Flash files on
your desktop. Currently there is almost no integration for these. They
are played back and thumbnailed with an older version of Swfdec
through Totem and this solution is definitely far superior than that.

Isn't swfdec-gnome a bit young? Its git log looks like it's only a week old?
In fact, all these applications already existed as part of the Swfdec
source tree for over a year, they just weren't installed. We only
recently took the work to split them off to be able to make them
really GNOMEy without having loads of GNOME dependencies in the core
library.

Cheers,
Benjamin


[1] http://swfdec.freedesktop.org