[Swfdec] Swfdec and Ffmpeg only

[Benjamin Otte]

Hey,

The reason why Swfdec does not support more than one sound system,
HTTP backend or multimedia system is very simple: The main
developer(s) (read: me) only uses one of each and wants to use his
time to improve the Flash player instead of supporting multiple
backends of a non-working player. So every backend that wasn't updated
whenever necessary was thrown out. It's not hard to add back, it's
just that the Swfdec devs don't want to keep it working.

That said, active Swfdec development has pretty much stopped, so
you'll likely not see any new features in the near future anyway.

Cheers,
Benjamin


On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 3:13 AM, Barry Kauler <bkauler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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