Flash & Gnash

[Rob Savoye]

Edward Cherlin wrote:
> The video in XO Speak: Speech Synthesis for One Laptop Per Child,
> http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/xo_speak_speech_synthesis.html
> http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.js?mediaId:761721;affiliateId:137131;backColor:#000000;frontColor:#ffffff;gradColor:#000000;width:480;height:392;
> 
> showing a child using Speak, doesn't play in Gnash. How can we get
> that fixed? YouTube videos mostly play fine, so we know that there is
> no sound technical reason for the problem. For example, the Theora
> encoding is supported in Free/Open Source software.

  The video player is written using the very latest swf v9, which Gnash
is still working on. We do support many of the swf v8 players, like
YouTube's, but this one we never get to the video at all. If somebody
could recompile that swf file that's the actual media player, it should
work, or at least be close to working.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
> 
> "Theora is an open and royalty-free lossy video compression technology
> being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg
> project. Based upon On2 Technologies' VP3 codec, Theora is targeted at
> competing with MPEG-4, WMV, and similar low-bitrate video compression
> schemes."

  Gnash already has Ogg Vorbis and Theora support. I'm also working on
my own media server, that speaks flash, but also support Theora instead
of FLV. We're big fans of using patent free codecs as much as possible.

> The real reason for this problem is Adobe, which refuses to either
> create a Free Flash player, or to provide information to allow the
> community to build one. I invite you to complain to them, also. You

  We don't need Adobe's help, we're far past the point in our reverse
engineering for Gnash where it would help anymore. What we do need is
community support to solve this problem by increasing the pace of
development of Gnash. There is only a small handful of us working on
Gnash. There's alot of sharp engineers on this list. If we all got
motivated, we could push Gnash to the point we don't care about Adobe at
all. Seriously...

	- rob -