[Swfdec] Compiling swfdec

[Benjamin Otte]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 7:36 PM, Peter Carlson <pcarlson at kgisystems.com> wrote:
> I noticed the compiled swfdec lib is
> about 5mb.  We only have about 1mb of space or so to work with for this
> feature.  We do not need all the features of flash, just some basic display
> the swf, and receive UI notifications.
> 1. Approximately how small can swfdec be compiled down to?
>
I don;t know anyone who has ever tried to remove features from Swfdec
by not compiling parts of the code, so I have no idea. In theory it
shoudln't be that hard to just remove certain files from the source as
all the Flash objects are usually implemented in a self-contained way,
but as I said: in practice noone did that yet.
If you want to save size, adding -DSWFDEC_DISABLE_DEBUG to the CFLAGS
- before running configure - will certainly help. It removes all
debugging output. Other options that might save space at the cost of
debuggability are -DG_DISABLE_CHECKS -DG_DISABLE_ASSERT
-DG_DISABLE_CAST_CHECKS
With all of them enabled and -O3 stripped, libswfdec is roughly twice
as fast and libswfdec-0.9.so takes 892839 bytes here, which is a lot
less than my 22.5MB for the non-stripped debug enabled libswfdec I
usually use. ;)

> 2. We started to look at flash-lite but can't find any sources for it.
>
It's closed source, so I'm not surprised you don't find sources - but
I guess Adobe will sell them for lots of money. :)

> 3. Any other recommendations for a super lite flash player?
>
You could look at Gnash or older (and therefore less featureful and
smaller) libswfdec versions, but I have no idea if that buys you
anything.

Cheers,
Benjamin