Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats

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."

Defence agains silverlight?

[sucker_muts]

I guess Adobe is doing this to try to stop silverlight getting too much attention.

Since Microsoft seems to want a new way of control of new web enabled devices with silverlight, I guess this is a good thing.
(And obviously this way gnash can implement better compatibility more easily!)

Re:too little, too late

[Jellybob]

Let me translate that to the real world for you:

"I'd Adobe to put the Flash player (as well as the Flash program itself) under the GPL license. However, if they don't, they'll still have > 90% browser penetration, and be used by YouTube to deliver huge quantities of crap video to people."

Right now, in the age of streaming video, Flash is about as relevant as you can get.

Re:Great

[BinaryOne]

This is good news.

For those of use who use flash (for instructional simulations) this means (hopefully) new tools and a chance to deal with the accessibility issues flash has.

While AS3 has improved accessibility classes, products like Articulate and Camtasia have been slow to enable them in their products.

Re:too little, too late

[Viceroy Potatohead]

I don't think that's necessary. It's the same thing with hardware, or MS formats or whatever. If a complete and accurate spec is available, the open source community can make their own player/driver/reader/writer or whatever.

Adobe may not be providing an open source player here, but they are giving the information needed for us to make one ourselves. Isn't that basically what we've been wanting from hardware manufacturers?

Also, this makes a Linux Flash writer possible. oOFlash? I really don't see anything to complain about here.

Re:I thought SWF was open?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft are Open... at the moment

Remember the 3 or 4 E's
    Embrace - Put Silverlight out there and 'give' it away so that the dominance of Flash is removed.
    Extend - the functionality but keep this 'closed'
    Extinguish - then Flas is sufficiently dead on the water, release a now closed version of Silverlight and say to themselves 'Gotcha'.
    Exterminate - all copetition. Make the Linux Version so horribly crippled with the new version that everone is using the practical chances of any year in the future becoming the 'year of the linux desktop' a total impossibility.

IMHO, its all part of the MS Master Plan for continued desktop domination. Frankly, any company that falls for their offer of 40 pieces of silver should suffer the same fate as SCO.

Re:Apple's gonna write their own flash player?

[nahdude812]

They don't do this because it's a vector for non-Apple-approved applications to run on the iPhone. It's the same reason they refuse to allow Java to run on it. They want to control what people run on the phone so they can charge for services which free (speech/beer) software could enable for... well, for free (beer).

Re:Defence agains silverlight?

[TropicalCoder]

It just happens that you believe Adobe is better than Microsoft, but they are just the same, and will do anything at all costs to crush the opponent.

Come on - you're kidding, right? Adobe competes in the niche market with Pdf and Flash, whereas Microsoft p0wns 85% of desktop computers in the world, and is a convicted monopolist? That is typical M$ party line, where they try to say the "enemy" is no different. They tried that in the M$OOXML scandal, rationalizing their unscrupulous tactics by saying Open Source companies were just as bad. How come they are always in such a position? everybody does it - we are no worse that them - that is the meme they keep pushing both directly, and indirectly via their proxies we encounter on \. Pretty pathetic, I think. How about not behaving badly in the first place, instead of all these rationalization?

Of course there are problems for linux about using .NET as platform, and WMV as codecs. But mono has been putting a great effort into this, there are other codecs available.

if Microsoft makes a deal with Novell to release a good silverlight player for linux to compete with flash...

Leading right down the slippery slope to eventually putting a Microsoft tax on Linux? Your argument is pure Company Line. Microsoft would be proud of you. Maybe if you talk to them you could get a little revenue stream going for yourself, planting M$ FUD on \. like others. I hear the pay is not too bad.

Re:More details

[ystar]

The mere idea of higher ups at a previously assumed Big Evil Company paying attention to discussions on Slashdot (with critiques here often ruthless, multifaceted, and heavily biased towards consumer interests) is pretty shocking, and heartening.

If this signals a major shift in Adobe's operating culture, I think it's cause for celebration.

Re:Apple's gonna write their own flash player?

[ConceptJunkie]

I find it amusing (and astounding) that apps written on Flash (minus video) seem to run at about 1% of what you could do with native programming. It's nice to see all those cute games, which are largely the kinds of things we saw on DOS about 15 years ago. It's not nice that those DOS-style games will peg a processor running at 100 times the speed of what those DOS games run on.

Re:Defence agains silverlight?

[Tumbleweed]

I would, but their website requires Javascript. Is this some kind of joke? What year is this?

My friend, it seems YOU are the one confused about the year. The year is something like 10 years PAST the time you should be running with JavaScript off. Welcome to the new world, one full of interesting and (potentially) useful things like AJAX. It's time to put the Gopher client out of its misery, upgrade the 19.2kbps ZyXel modem you got at a discount for running a part-time BBS, and for God's sake, stop listening to Weird Al Yankovic's "All About the Pentiums" and giggling at all the geek jokes.

I'm guilty of only one of these. :)

Re:Apple's gonna write their own flash player?

[debatem1]

Its all about developer time vs CPU time. Nobody's going to spend two thousand developer hours taking something from O(nlogn) to O(n) anymore except in very special circumstances, and this is one of those cases where *nobody cares*. Not the developers, not the consumers, not even the sites hosting them. And the few old-school (read: good) programmers are left throwing their hands up in disgust and inching that much closer to the 'get offa my lawn' guy.

Re:Apple's gonna write their own flash player?

[garbletext]

Because *other* people use it extensively? Parent was talking about the iPhone, which does not support flash, yet easily could.

Re:great - now someone can make a better flash?

[snuf23]

Well that's what happens when you take an application designed for making non-interactive 2D animations and turn it into a development platform.

Re:Apple's gonna write their own flash player?

[DECS]

The iPhone could "easily" support Flash if it either:

- used an old version that didn't properly render modern Flash content (like the Flash used in the PlayStation 3)

- used a Lite version of Flash that didn't render anything but a minor subset of Flash, and which will only work with basic FLA video players in its latest version (not officially out yet IIRC)

- used a completely reengineered, yet somehow backwards compatible version of Flash that perfectly ran PC targeted Flash content that currently plays like crap on the Mac with memory leaks and other bugs, but rewritten for the iPhone's ARM architecture with major integration into Apple's Cocoa Touch software.

So yeah, that'd be a piece of cake if Apple gave two shits about spending a year constructing a crutch to hold up Adobe's shitty platform that should go away and make way for a real reach Internet application platform such as HTML 5.

I don't think Apple is going to do that, and if Adobe could, they might have already fixed their Mac version.

It appears that you think is some sort of conspiracy, or that Apple has a moral obligation to devote its resources to supporting a shitty architecture that destroys the web, but only because there are a handful of useful things that could far more easily be redesigned to use standards that are already open.

Gone in a Flash: More on Appleâ(TM)s iPhone Web Plans [roughlydrafted.com]