Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com> wrote:
> Seth Woodworth Wrote:
>  >Holy Crap!  That's amazing.
>  >We need this *on* the laptops.  Curse you flash!
>  >Does it work alright in gnash?  Or should we transcode it?
>
>  There are a lot of great education activities done in Flash and their #
>  will only increase simply because it is very easy to develop animations
>  using flash. Check out www.eshikshaindia.in for more great learning
>  animations. Those did not work w/ Gnash when I tried it last month.
>
>  I have a lot of respect for what the Gnash guys have done but the best
>  strategy would be to make it easy for deployment teams to bundle flash
>  w/ the XO. So many Internet sites depend on it.

That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best.

* Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as
I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for.
Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I
didn't see it in any of the obvious places.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnash/.
http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Wait, here it is: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Gnash points
to http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Release_0_8_3, which has a
Roadmap section.

    *  Reduce memory fragmentation and general bloat.
    * Fix super - I'm working on this strk 11:36, 10 March 2008 (EDT);
    * Start implementing AS3 classes.
    * Further improve media handling.
    * Stabilize ffmpeg media backend.
    * Win32 support. - Dossy in progress Dossy 11:38, 10 March 2008 (EDT)
    * Bring other GUIs, particularly Qt and FLTK, up to the level of
the GTK gui.
    * Get Gnash working with Qt4 and KDE4.
    * Allow opening SWFs successively in Gnash and opening movies from
the GUI. - Dossy plans to work on this ;)
    * Decide on the logging method: vsnprintf or boost::format.
    * Implement Microphone and Camera classes.

I guess I'm asking for more detail on the "Further improve media
handling" section.

* We need to bother Adobe publicly about its foolish licensing policy.
They should allow for bundling the player with other software in
factory builds. They should also open up the design and support Gnash,
thus saving themselves development time and money.

Adobe hasn't even gotten around to creating any 64-bit Flash
implementations. This is ridiculous, though not an issue for the XO-1.

* I think we should also create a more public place for listing which
Flash sites do and don't work with Gnash. This will aid in asking
sites to post Gnash-compatible videos, and in asking Adobe to
straighten up and fly right.

The only such place I am aware of is the Gnash page on the OLPC Wiki,
where I listed videos about OLPC and the XO that do or do not play in
Gnash. The Wiki page Video of the OLPC should have notes about which
ones will play on the XO. Then we can combine the lists in one place.

I have written to charbax at OLPC.tv to complain that the videos there
aren't XO-friendly. Presumably someone here can help him set up a
recoding system, so that at least one site other than YouTube is
Child-Friendly.

> From my understanding of
>  the Adobe license terms, you can distribute Flash w/in an intranet,
>  which I judge to mean I can install it on the XO's for Nepal's pilot
>  schools. One thing is definitely clear, you cannot bundle flash into an
>  xo image available on the internet. However, I believe that I can make
>  the flash plugin to a school intranet via the XS and still conform to
>  the Adobe license.
>
>  AFAIK the flash plugin only requires one file to be installed as far as
>  I can tell  libflashplayer.so
>
>  The easiest way technically to do this would be to put in a symlink
>  from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /home/olpc/mozilla/plugins
>
>  and then modify the customization key script to look for flash and other
>  plugins and copy them to the home/.../plugins folder
>
>  Bryan
>  Kathmandu

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay