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."

Great

This problem doesn't mean opening the code for the player, but still, it will help projects like Gnash, etc.

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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 Camt

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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 (

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

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.

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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

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

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

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]

Defence agains silverlight?

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!)

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No way, they know exactly why they made it, and they do in fact need it very badly.

Flex + Flash's ubiquity + Adobe Air = obviated operating system. It doesn't matter what OS you run if you can create a single application which runs on mobile phones, from

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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 Microsof

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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 t

hmm.

this is not the same as open sourcing it.

i would guess this is more like attempting to gain market share at the same time as holding the family jewels close to the chest as it were.

still, its a step in the right direction to be sure.

Interesting how things change

IIRC, Macromedia's original rationale for keeping the formats secret was to prevent a certain unnamed competitor from embracing and extending them. Presumably they're counting on Microsoft being so committed to Silverlight that they're not going to turn on a dime, ditch their system (which their people believe, with some justification, to be technically superior) and replace it with a bastardisation of Flash.

More details

If you didn't bother to RTFA, here are a few more pertinent details. The specific actions Adobe will take include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

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:More details

Thank you. I work for Adobe and have been involved in more open source and open standards stuff including PDF going to ISO, The core Flash runtime VM (Tamarin) going open source to SourceForge, the Flex Compiler going open source and the data services component going open source and free (BlaseDS). Adobe really is listening to groups like Slashdot and from now on, anyone who thinks they can write a leaner Flash Player can go ahead and do it.

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So then can you clear up the IP issues with On2 VP6 and mpeg codecs that are used in the players? Does "free" mean that we all have a unrecoverable license to use these codecs (that means all the patents that are claimed over these codecs as well) with fla

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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 si

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As I have asked elsewhere (without reply) what about patents, and codecs. The format is all nice and stuff but IIRC flash uses the VP6 & VP7 codecs from On2. On2 is not really all that open with its IP as the ffmpeg group found out (IIRC). Its like hav

Re:too little, too late

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.

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Actually VP6 and 7, Sorenson Spark are very high end codecs. Youtube's problem was (deliberately?) encoding video like junk with horrible settings and the original's horrible quality as it is ripped from TV (already compressed), low end DV camera without

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Yes, then we'd be able to fix why it uses 100% CPU time most of the time.

Re:too little, too late

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.

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

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 g

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Well, Gnash has a 64 bit flash plugin, and hopefully this information will help it advance and become better.

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