[Swfdec] Swfdec and Ffmpeg only

[Barry Kauler]

Hi,
I'm the founder and still very active developer of Puppy Linux, and a
variant named Quirky. Puppy is a cut-down distro, typically 100MB
live-CD. We have always used the Adobe Flash player, though I have
stayed with the Flash 9 player (9.0.48.0) due to its smaller size.

Puppy also has ffmpeg, xine-lib and gxine.

Recently I have been experimenting with Swfdec and Swfdec-mozilla. I
started with the latest stable releases and Gstreamer, but I could
only get Flash videos to play the video, no sound.

However, I don't want Gstreamer, it's too big. Ffmpeg alone has become
extremely capable. The 'ffplay' utility (in Ffmpeg, uses SDL) plays
almost all my video and audio files. Not quite: using Ffmpeg from svn
December 29, 2009, I found that my RealMedia videos played only video
no sound -- ffmpeg has the required 'sipr' audio decoder but it
doesn't work. They are almost there, ffplay plays everything else.

Unfortunately, direct linking with Ffmpeg was dropped from Swfdec
after version 0.6.8, so I went back to that version, and
Swfdec-mozilla 0.6.0. Very interesting, it is stable, I have played a
few dozen videos so far at youtube.com, all played, with video and
sound. The only thing wrong with it is the control buttons in the GUI
are a bit peculiar -- replay behavior is very odd.
Also, I had to use a slightly older Ffmpeg (Jan 2009) as the latest
from svn has some incompatibility that causes the browser (SeaMonkey
1.1.18) to crash whenever try to play a video.

Anyway, what we are invisioning is a very compact distro with ffmpeg
and no xine/gstreamer/mplayer. We are looking at developing a wrapper
for ffplay that will present a basic GUI control box.

We already have a tiny audio player called Pmusic, and a audio CD
player called pCD, a tiny file format converter called wooFF and these
use the 'ffmpeg' utility (amongst others). For video DVDs we are
thinking of using Ogle, which is quite small.

This post is getting a bit long, so I'll get to the point...

Our plans based on ffmpeg results in incredible size savings, but I
have one very big request: that the latest Swfdec restore ability to
link directly with Ffmpeg (the latest out of svn) and libmad if
required.

Another problem is libsoup. Puppy uses openssl, but the last version
of libsoup to have the choice of openssl or gnutls was version
1.99.28. What I did was compile libsoup without SSL support, but I was
wondering if Swfdec could be made to compile with the old 1.99.28
libsoup?
Or, if SSL is not needed, there is nanohttp, which is part of libxml2.

Here are relevant postings on my blog:
Swfdec Flash player: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01298
Swfdec-mozilla Flash plugin: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01299
Fundamental questions about multimedia packages:
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01304
Ogle DVD player: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01305
Multimedia unhappiness: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01306
Ffmpeg recompiled for Quirky 003: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01307

Puppy home: http://puppylinux.com/
Quirky home: http://bkhome.org/quirky/

It would be great if you guys could consider the possibilities of these ideas!

Regards,
Barry Kauler