Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats 262
Wolfcat writes to tell us that Adobe announced today that they are opening the SWF and FLV formats via the Open Screen Project. "The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes."
Great (Score:4, Informative)
Re:64 bit inux perhaps? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SVG (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)
Re:too little, too late (Score:3, Informative)
The big issue was the Sorenson and On2 being big time MS Lapdogs and never offering any real solution except Windows market. Truth to be said, they are not bad quality codecs. Check their reference pages (demos etc.) to see what they actually are.
In fact, current quality/bandwidth/multiplatform champion is Realvideo 10 and it is MPEG4 based too. Of course it is a bit hard to convince user to install it even while Real gives whole thing (except codecs) as open source. You know, history haunting.
More details (Score:5, Informative)
If you didn't bother to RTFA, here are a few more pertinent details. The specific actions Adobe will take include:
This is huge in that it means we can finally start porting the Flash runtime to other platforms. It's not yet completely open source, but I'm encouraged by the steps Adobe is taking. They're at least moving in the right direction.
Re:too little, too late (Score:3, Informative)
I've been making SWFs on Linux for years. Swfmill [swfmill.org] is quite capable (the svn version has very good SVG support and works well with Inkscape), there is a fine language and compiler called haXe [haxe.org] that can even compile for other targets as well (the Neko [neko-vm.org] and generated Javascript, with PHP support [weblob.net] in the works), among other tools.
Also, the Flex SDK is already open [adobe.com] and works on Linux (it's Java). Finally, their (proprietary) Flexbuilder for Linux is currently a public alpha [adobe.com].
Re:More details (Score:4, Informative)