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I read Steve Fulton's article that you linked. The gist is that nobody has yet written support libraries for Canvas-based game development.

On top of the fact that there aren't support libraries, it's also that the core API doesn't support basic functionality needed by game developers (such as playing two copies of the same sound simultaneously -- I.E. gunshots or explosions).

My cousin. He and others in his position have far more time than money, which is why they stick to Free or otherwise free tools. Imagine a high school student on summer break whose school isn't on the list of schools that get a discount on Flash CS5. These people are likely to be the people who write the support libraries that Canvas currently lacks.

Then he might be one of the people who is interested in the free and open-source compiler that Adobe released several years back. FlashDevelop is one of the best free tools for doing Flash development, though there are many many others.

I developed several games in Flash before I ever paid a single dime to Adobe -- using only free and open-source tools.

Wow, I must not be writing very clearly today, because you just completely repeated what I was trying to say.

The rest of my point was that since Adobe makes money from their creation tools, it doesn't matter to them if the underlying technology is flash or HTML5 or something else. They can still make the creation tools and still make money off them.

There is nothing special about the Flash format, Adobe doesn't use file-format lockin like Microsoft does. You can even find free tools to create Flash. Adobe wins by making better products than everyone else (or better advertising, I don't know), and they are confident they can continue winning, even if something replaces flash.

There's nothing closed and proprietary about the format. There already are open source groups rewriting it.

Adobe is doing significant rewrites. Take a look at the upcoming 10.1 release. Under the hood, it's a huge set of changes.

It is in Adobe's economic interest to do so as they have a huge investment in the technology. They have competition in the form of Silverlight, HTML5, etc, and said open source.

One of those Javascript engines you speak of was contributed to open source by Adobe.

As politicians like to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, just not their own facts.

Currently, most of the web (Flash excluded) is free to generate.

Err, SWF *is* completely free to generate, aside from the patent-encumbered video codec parts (H.264 and Sorenson) and maybe the MP3/AAC audio codecs. Here's the spec, go to it:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v10.pdf

Here's a website full of open-source tools for it:

http://osflash.org/

(And about the "yeah-but-audio-video-patents" exceptions -- hey, don't blame Adobe for that. They don't even hold those patents, they have to pay big bucks for 'em too!)

I'd go around about the way you planned. Flash is actually very good for this sort of thing. I'd also look into Air, maybe that's viable for this. I'd be carefull with linux clients though, Flash and the Linux rendering stack don't allways play well together.

Use Linux for the server and look into FOSS streaming servers like Red5. osflash should be your next stop.

See if you can go with OSx on MacMinis for the kiosk systems, they'd be my safest bet and you can do neat stuff with the IR remote and some extra shareware. Remoting and control-wise.

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

I don't know about tools, but O'Reilly has a few books about AS2: Essential ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition.

Now I can't say for sure that they'll meet your needs, but at least you'll have a language reference.

You may also find MING useful, it's a library for coding Flash apps. More info at: Ming Flash Examples and Tutorials.

And I assume you've seen the OSFlash site.

As title says, Real has a nice streaming server called Real Helix and a producer (tool that creates the stream and sends it to the server for other people to view from server) called Real Producer.

There is a free version for both Real Server and Real Producer Basic.

Here's the page:
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/free_trial.html.

I believe you're not allowed to use the software commercially. As you use it for school and for noncommercial purposes you should be fine.
It may also be worth to send an email to Real because they may have discounts for educational licenses.
Anyway, Real Producer is about 100$

You just have to install the server on any computer with good network card because that's the computer that all classrooms will download the stream from. Your stream will be about 200-300KB/s for each user but you can change it as you want, for better or lower quality.

You install Real Producer on a somewhat powerful (a Core2Duo will be enough) computer with a TV tuner. Start the software, select the tv tuner as video and audio input, configure where to upload the stream and the bitrate and you're all set.

There are tutorials to help you on Real's website.

I've done this broadcasting football games at 80+ people in a college dormitory, on a 100mbps network so it definitely works.

Another alternative (though I didn't test this) would be to use an open source Flash streaming server like Red5 ( http://osflash.org/red5 ) and use the free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3 ( http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/flashmediaencoder/ ) to record and send the stream to the Flash server.

What you seem to ignore is that often there is often no real incentive to decide against using Flash, especially when it comes to full screen Flash websites, and you will find this quite often in situations where profit is important. In fact, in certain areas such as educational websites, you would be rather silly to use anything else.

I'm not sure what you mean by actual code, as you will find that Flash is very much made up of code.

In my view the usefulness of Flash outweighs the complaints of any number of head-banging ideologues shouting from the periphery, and the efforts of Adobe to open Flash up are a great bonus, and a likely reason for why it has been so widely adopted by the open source community. http://www.osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

Flex Builder from Adobe is based on Eclipse! You can install it as a plugin into an existing Eclipse install, or install the stand-alone version. The open-source Flex SDK and compiler are both free if you don't want to shell out for Flex Builder.

There's FDT, another Eclipse Plugin for Flash/Flex development.

There are also completely open-source options for developing Flash/Flex content, in Eclipse, or the IDE of your choice. Windows, Mac or Linux.

I haven't touched the Flash IDE for the last four years.

The red5 opensource flash application server along with the openmeetings video conference / whiteboard application might help for organizing voice + video meetings. Clients just require a flash 10 plugin in their browser. opeenmeetings allows for uploading/sharing office files with live preview using openoffice + pdf2swf and image files with imagemagick and also add a nice desktop sharing feature.

Spend a few bucks converting a high quality source to Flash Video format. THEN:

If you want to host it yourself, check out HaXeVideo. Also, Red5 is supposedly widely adopted.

If you're uncomfortable with open source, check out Wowza or FMS2 - both of these proprietary servers let 10 people watch your video at the same time, and come with plenty of examples. As long as your computer is connected to the internets & you know how to configure a router...

You are right, this was about money. It costs less to use this solution.

Not true.

Adobe wants your arm and a leg and possible your left nut for licensing for streaming flash.

http://osflash.org/red5

Windows media is essentially free.

Uh, no. You have to buy Server 2003, then the WMV streaming server is 'free'. That is in terms of cost, of course; if you're not too worried about facts, you're probably even less concerned by restrictive licensing.

Was the last time you checked the EULA when Flash was a Macromedia product, or after Adobe bought Macromedia and released a new version? I'll admit I never read the EULA as my former employer owned the license and it was a company issue.

There are many proprietary commercial Flash clones that produce SWF files. There are also many freeware (closed source but free to use) and open source packages.

Two commercial packages have general-purpose timeline/programming IDEs similar to the genuine article. One is SWiSH Max from SWiSHzone (silly capitalization is theirs, not mine). Another is Namo FreeMotion from .

Many people say that Swish Max is much easier to use than Flash, but I didn't really care for the demo. To buy it is $150 so I might iinvest in it since there are some things it can do that my software can't.

FreeMotion 2008 is practically a clone of an older Flash version -- Macromedia Flash MX 2004. It has a similar interface, supports ActionScript 1 and 2, and outputs to Flash 6 or 7 formats. It doesn't work with FLA files but it does open existing published SWF files for editing. It does almost everything Flash MX 2004 does, but it won't work well with much of the stuff produced in Flash 8 or 9. I own a copy of FreeMotion 2008 (the default version on the Namo website is still 2006, so make sure you get the right version). It was only $59.95 to purchase a fully licensed download, but I opted to extend my download rights from 30 days to 2 years for another $4.95 just in case my backups get lost.

There are programs from Eltima Software and SoThink that turn SWF files into FLA files for use by official Macromedia or Adobe Flash. I've only used the trial versions of these, both of which are somewhat crippled. I'm not sure which I prefer, since the most interesting features are the ones that don't work in the trial versions.

There are many specialized Flash creators with visual interfaces. Some focus on educational software, while some focus on banners, media players, photo galleries, or games. Some are commercial while others are OSS or freeware.

There are also a number of textual Flash tools. Some work with XML. Some use ActionScipt directly. Some are libraries for C/C++, Python, PHP, or Perl. HaXe has a standard library supporting Flash features and will compile codee to SWF.

For a partial list of OSS software that works with Flash files or is used to support development of them, take a look at the projects page of the OS Flash Project.

I personally use FreeMotion when a timeline is really handy or there's a good ActionScript 1 or 2 library that works with it which would make my life really easy. I use HaXe for any Flash work I want to approach from ground-up programming perspective. I've tinkered with MTASC but I haven't used it seriously. I've yet to dabble with Flex.

If I keep getting more requests for updates to more recent Flash stuff designed elsewhere, I might need to break down and buy CS3.3 (well, probably take an old-version discount on CS3 somewhere actually). I don't do very much Flash work right now, though, and the price on the Adobe stuff is steep. The OSS stuff is nice, and the lower-end commercial stuff works for many things.

I could probably get used to the Swish Max IDE for the price difference, though. Anyone know the limitations on ActionScript compatibility and Flash Player 9 output of version 2?

I'd like to note here that the SWF file format finally has a published specification. Thanks, Adobe!

Now would be a great time for a project like Gnash (or any OpenFlash-linked project) to get some funds.

OpenFlash lists IDEs, compilers, players, resusable libraries for handling SWF files, programming language bindings for working with those libraries, components, debuggers, byte code manipulators, and projects built on Flash which all could use some help right now.

Personally, I like to create my Flash primarily from a programming language rather than a time line editor, so I tend to use HaXe. Others use MTASC or other tools on the creation side. The players are pretty important for those not using Windows, OS X, or a well-packaged mainstream Linux. Perhaps the libraries that are used by many projects would be a good focus, too.

So basically it's nothing like Flash at all then?

You are right.
Official web site.
They state that salasaga is a "Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning". SWF is just an output media.

For those interested in Open source Flash tool. I'm currently testing FlashDevelop (IDE for Actionscript). Looks quite nice and useful
the web site (well an "official forum") (Windows compatible only AFAIK)
More info on here

http://osflash.org/projects Large list of open-source flash-related projects, alot (most?) of them are cross-platform.

What Flash de-compiler do you use? (Google search)

Closed source flash tools lists only one decompiler. The Open Source Flash Projects list has no decompilers.

What Flash de-compiler do you use? (Google search)

Closed source flash tools lists only one decompiler. The Open Source Flash Projects list has no decompilers.

But don't WiiCade developers have to pay Adobe $700 plus tax to get started?

Or can one develop a competent Wii game using only DHTML?

You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:

• Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
• Open Office; KOffice;
• granted, there's no equivalent to iTunes which will talk to the iTunes store;
• Freewheeling, SooperLooper, Audacity, Rosegarden...;
• Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
• As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?

Say all you want about Internet Explorer, but I can't stress how important Silverlight is. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, the folks at Adobe want the same world domination as the Redmont folks do. A little competition never hurts...the customers. :)

The big problem with Silverlight is that all the developer tools are Windows only and the public specification seems to be missing (if there is public spec please post a reference). You can't create a new standard if you are hiding the specs.

File format specs are available for SWF: http://osflash.org/swf, but that doesn't been I appreciate a web site designed exclusively in Flash either.

Few, though, can match the slick ease of use of RealPlayer 11 -- and it isn't even out of beta yet.

• Adobe employee (engineer?) bringing up some of the issues: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/07/ real_problem.cfm
• Real's response to the above post: http://rws-blog.rhapsody.com/realplayer/2007/07/re alplayer-beta.html
• Flash/FMS communication details: http://blog.jaycharles.net/?p=9
• Other details. From comments here it suggests that RP11 is installing some kind of proxy for the Flash communication: http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2007/8/1/rea l-bug

I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we'd receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was "open source" when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. [...] Most of the time they would say "Oops! Thanks for letting us know--we'll promote our software in some other way." And they did, until last year.

But what about Scilab, which on its home page prominently claims to be The open source platform for numerical computation (and has been doing so for years)? Scilab clearly does not qualify for the (widely agreed-upon) OSI definition of "open source", because the license prohibits commercial redistribution of modified versions. And yet I've never heard of an OSI campaign to pressure Scilab to either change its license or stop calling itself "open source". As a result, there are many examples of people who have confused Scilab's license with the usual definition of "open source".

It's probably best if you start off learning what SWFs are and how the Flash "IDE" works before you start looking at the alternatives. It's a pretty complex system with heavy emphasis on graphics and animation and a large amount of cruft. You can trial Flash for 30 days, after that you can look at tools like FDT, MTASC, SWFmill and FlashDevelop. See osflash.org for a variety of open source tools around the Flash platform (like MTASC and SWFmill).

Linux users do not have to pay for software

There, I fixed your purposeful omission it for you.

take responsibility for your own needs and write the software you want.

Isn't free software up to the challenge?

Where have you been for the past twenty years?

like it or not, flash is the standard for web animation and its growing.

it's cross platorm, immensely powerful and there is a fast growing open source community behind it - (http://blog.papervision3d.org/, http://osflash.org/)

you can crap on ad nauseum about svg and the like but no ones' listening.

So that raises a few questions:
1) Can reverse-engineering the file format give enough information to make a fully-featured flash decoder/player?
2) Will Adobe try to stop such reverse-engineering efforts?
3) Is it worth it to continue along the Flash route, or should supporters of Open Standards promote an alternate vector-based animation/movie format?

1) What is it you're missing? Google SWF spec and the first hit will be the specs without the restriction. It seems to be a copy of the original specs, though, so better stick with Alexis' reference. You could also read the sources of various tools, or the existing OS player. For the opcodes of the new VM, you could read the sources of a compiler or the VM itself.

2) Apparently they didn't. Neither did they try to stop the OS streaming server.

3) Both would make sense, depending on how you plan to use it. For the web, SWF will stay the king, IMHO. Users don't like installing additional plugins, but that wouldn't be a problem for standalone apps.
The bigger problem is content creation, both for a new format and for SWF. There are very good OS tools for making SWFs already, but they are focussed on programmers. If you want to write code and maybe include some assets like graphics and fonts that you then use with it, I'd say you're better off with the OS tools. But for graphical work like animations or layout, there isn't really a way around Adobe products for professional work (just that you can do animations and layout without them doesn't mean your designer will consider it an efficient, comfortable workflow, and he's right). This is where work needs to be done. Better SVG import for the tools, or direct SWF output for Inkspace or even a specialized app.

The problem with Real, QuickTime, Windows Media and all the other video players, is that all they are just stupid video players boxed into a rectangular prison, and not customizable or adaptable in any way. You can't add to their user interface, or fix their horrible design problems. No control over how closed captioning is presented. No transparent video overlays. No extra buttons or links to related videos. No webcam support or two-way video conferencing.

From a user interface design perspective, Flash has an enormous advantage over old-school video players, because developers are able to deeply customize and integrate the video player into their own user interfaces, like Google's and YouTube's video players, the OpenLaszlo YouTube player, or the SimFaux Network TV Fox News Simulation.

The other overwhelming advantage to Flash over all the other video players, is that it's installed on way more platforms than any other existing video player. So the fact that it has almost universal coverage, plus the fact that you can customize the user interface (like YouTube, Google Video, and everyone else does), combine to make Flash the hands-down best way to distribute video over the internet.

Here's an example of what I mean by customization: A set of reusable video playback and recording components that I've developed for OpenLaszlo, which are easy to customize and integrate into your own OpenLaszlo applications:

OpenLaszlo YouTube Player Demo and Source Code

I've been working on developing streaming video support for OpenLaszlo: LZX classes to support improved audio and video, including RTMP streaming via Flash Media Server (aka Flash Communication Server) and also the Red5 Open Source Flash Server, as well as streaming video via http. It supports playback of recorded FLVs, recording from camera and microphone, live two-way (or multi-party) audio/video conferencing, and FLV streaming over http.

It's easy to use the OpenLaszlo video components, because they're nicely integrated with the OpenLaszlo programming model. They expose logical attributes and events which make it easy to integrate video into OpenLaszlo applications.

To test it out the code and demonstrate its functionality, I've developed a simple YouTube Player in OpenLaszlo [click here to open it in a window]. It uses the YouTube ReST Web API, and some simple html screen scraping to get the URL parameters to stream the FLV file directly.

Here is the source for the test application wrapper that puts the YouTube video player in a resizable window, and the more interesting source for the youtubeplayer component, that uses the new OpenLaszlo video classes I'm developing (whose source is in this directory).

The new video classes and the YouTube player demo are now checked into the OpenLaszlo svn repository.

Flash Player 9 is more than just an update to what you all have known as flash. Sure, it will still play older flash content but new content written in Actionscript 3.0 using the new Actionscript Virtual Machine to playback will be way more efficient. The new methodologies for programming have a large base in JAVA, so JAVA developers will have any easy time using this new tool to make true ( rich internet ) applications that have greater ubiquity than JAVA on the web. To be honest, I think it will help take flash away from being a great tool for building horribly intrusive banner ads to being better know as one of the great tools for building rich internet experiences. On the note of proprietary versus open source, sure it is a proprietary program but Macro-Dobe ( Macromedia / Adobe ) have done a great job of using the open source community ( http://www.osflash.org/ ) to push themselves into making a better product. They support the open source development, even if it competes ( http://osflash.org/red5 ) directly with one of their products.

Flash Player 9 is more than just an update to what you all have known as flash. Sure, it will still play older flash content but new content written in Actionscript 3.0 using the new Actionscript Virtual Machine to playback will be way more efficient. The new methodologies for programming have a large base in JAVA, so JAVA developers will have any easy time using this new tool to make true ( rich internet ) applications that have greater ubiquity than JAVA on the web. To be honest, I think it will help take flash away from being a great tool for building horribly intrusive banner ads to being better know as one of the great tools for building rich internet experiences. On the note of proprietary versus open source, sure it is a proprietary program but Macro-Dobe ( Macromedia / Adobe ) have done a great job of using the open source community ( http://www.osflash.org/ ) to push themselves into making a better product. They support the open source development, even if it competes ( http://osflash.org/red5 ) directly with one of their products.

http://www.osflash.org/swfmill

also see

http://mtasc.org/ (a better, faster, open-source Actionscript compiler)

and http://haxe.org/ (a better, faster, open-source language for writing flash and other things in)

I agree you probably want to buy flash, but if you want to develop for free you can. There are many compilers and tools at http://www.osflash.org/

...but have you looked into using Flash?

There's Red5 as an open source streaming server, as a compiler you could use the open source haXe or the free-as-in-beer Flex 2 SDK.

I'm not a huge fan of Flash in general. It is too much like FrontPage... A thousand script kiddies to every 1 intelligent user. However, I believe a closer interaction and level of support for scripting languages that are shared between standard HTML pages and embedded objects will simplify (and hopefully speed up) development. ECMA Script is a very powerful tool in the right hands and Flash has some very interesting capabilities when paired with the Flash Media Server or Red5 (OSS) My 7 cents.

I just saw a project called Tamarin (AVM2 open source) Flash9_DotReleases_Branch initial revision checked into the Mozilla CVS repository.

The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification.

http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64_final/
http://osflash.org/fc64/

Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).

Yeah, Tinic ranted about that on his blog a while ago, saying he used wine for Flash on Linux (before v9, obviously) -- and he's a FlashPlayer engineer. His entry about this beta release addresses performance. He says he's not happy with the current state of font rendering speed yet, but that it beats the Windows version by 20% with other stuff. They're still working on it.

Over all, you should see better performance of existing content, thanks to the new rendering engine introduced in v8. This is especially true for SWFs (competently) written for v8 and using cacheAsBitmap -- not rerendering vectors every frame seems to improve performance. Who would have thought...

The second performance increase will probably take a while to become common: FP9 comes with a new, JIT compiled VM. The old one is still included for backwards compatibility, but once FP9 has a good install base and is supported by developers making scripting-heavy stuff, you should definitely notice the performance increase -- it's much, much faster.

If somebody feels like playing with it, there's the free (beer) Flex SDK on the Adobe site somewhere. However, I'd like to recommend haXe, a Free (capital F) compiler for a very fine language, with a great type system, that I really enjoy coding in. It supports Flash 6 to 9, the Free NekoVM, and can generate JavaScript (Yes! Typed!). Windows users can use the FlashDevelop plugin, for the rest of us there's Eclipse with EHX.

Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).

Yeah, Tinic ranted about that on his blog a while ago, saying he used wine for Flash on Linux (before v9, obviously) -- and he's a FlashPlayer engineer. His entry about this beta release addresses performance. He says he's not happy with the current state of font rendering speed yet, but that it beats the Windows version by 20% with other stuff. They're still working on it.

Over all, you should see better performance of existing content, thanks to the new rendering engine introduced in v8. This is especially true for SWFs (competently) written for v8 and using cacheAsBitmap -- not rerendering vectors every frame seems to improve performance. Who would have thought...

The second performance increase will probably take a while to become common: FP9 comes with a new, JIT compiled VM. The old one is still included for backwards compatibility, but once FP9 has a good install base and is supported by developers making scripting-heavy stuff, you should definitely notice the performance increase -- it's much, much faster.

If somebody feels like playing with it, there's the free (beer) Flex SDK on the Adobe site somewhere. However, I'd like to recommend haXe, a Free (capital F) compiler for a very fine language, with a great type system, that I really enjoy coding in. It supports Flash 6 to 9, the Free NekoVM, and can generate JavaScript (Yes! Typed!). Windows users can use the FlashDevelop plugin, for the rest of us there's Eclipse with EHX.

That's just to name a few, there are others. There is plenty of code out there to generate and modify content, the official specification isn't needed for a player.

lol - i have to commend you for arguing with these characters.

on the video issue in particular, its amazing to hear this minority arguing the toss with plain old reality. reminds me of that Canute fellow.

As a development platform are you seriously going to tell me that ajax and co are the way to go?

they all use a bunch of different technologies that are all over the place? what about re-use? what about cross-browser issues?

what about the fact that ActionScript has fully matured and Flash is the prevailing trend?

what about the way that lots of os projects use flash; e.g. http://www.osflash.org/

while the mindless flash-bashers are looking up ubiquitous they might like to take the opportunity to check on the word solipsism and simian while they're at it.

http://www.osflash.org/red5

Check out the osflash website. Or better yet, keep being closed-minded.

There's also a bunch of resources for Open Source Flash, in particular the MTASC open source flash compiler and a new promising language called haxe that can be used for Flash but also AJAX/Javascript and on the Server side. Looks like it will be presented at OSCON 2006, might be interesting to follow.

How do I make an SWF?

There are dozens of true open-source tools for SWF creation.

A great source for them is here: http://www.osflash.org/

It's very easy. Encode the video in Flash and do a php call so the file name is never revealed - not even the url to the directory where the file *is* is revealed.

Sorry, you're right off the mark. Encoding the video in Flash (making an FLV file) does nothing special. People can download those and play those. They can see the HTTP requests the Flash player makes. You can't hide the filename, and PHP has nothing to do with it.

The secret sauce is the proprietary communication protocol called RTMP (Real-time Messaging Protocol) between the Flash player and the Flash server. The video isn't served up as a regular downloadable file, it's streamed using this protocol. It's unencrypted. If you parse the protocol correctly and take the video packets out of it, you get a regular FLV (Flash Video) that you can save off and play later.

RTMP is the method that Google Video, MyTube and others currently use to serve videos via Flash.

Until now, Macromedia were crowing about how this security through obscurity protects content producers. They're about to have a can of whoop-ass opened on them, as the RED5 team reverse-engineered the protocol - they've now done enough that they've released an open source Flash server that can serve up FLVs to the Flash player.

I can only imagine that it won't be long before someone publishes a stream ripper based on RED5's work.

There is an optional update at Windows Update that says something to the effect of "This update changes the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX ... blah blah blah".

I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.

I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.

ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.

The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".

The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.

The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.

you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo) that is XHTML compliant.

Also, I would like to point you to http://www.osflash.org/ for all your opensource Flash-needs.

I need a browser plugin that supports all the things you're talking about, and works on my amd64.

Yeah, I'm using those tools, too ("AMES" -- ASDT, MTASC, Eclipse and SWFMill). I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time and I finally could. Recently I began looking into ActionStep, and I must say I'm impressed. Other notable projects are ASwing (Swing implementation in ActionScript), and Red5 (server needed to make use of the client's webcam and for streaming videos).
On the player side, Gnash looks like the most promising attempt at the moment, but still has a far way to go. But once it's done, it will become possible to integrate it into "traditional" apps and use an SWF as the GUI (at least if the app is GPL), which is where Flash is best at. I don't see it replacing the proprietary plugin any time soon, though -- the next version (8.5, currently available as public alpha) will be a huge step.

I'm always amazed by the irrational comments each time something Flash related gets posted. I hate Flash banners, too. I also hated the animated GIF banners we had before Flash, especially combined with MIDI sound. Sometimes I think it's too easy to get started with Flash for people who have no idea what they're doing, but that doesn't mean it's inherently bad (I'm sure some will disagree). Accessibility is an issue, because unlike HTML, it takes extra effort to support it. And yeah, the official plugin is proprietary, but it's being worked on. Other than that, most of the stuff I read is either nonsense or due to improper use (which includes both how it's done and whether Flash is the right tool for the job in the first place).

Yeah, I'm using those tools, too ("AMES" -- ASDT, MTASC, Eclipse and SWFMill). I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time and I finally could. Recently I began looking into ActionStep, and I must say I'm impressed. Other notable projects are ASwing (Swing implementation in ActionScript), and Red5 (server needed to make use of the client's webcam and for streaming videos).
On the player side, Gnash looks like the most promising attempt at the moment, but still has a far way to go. But once it's done, it will become possible to integrate it into "traditional" apps and use an SWF as the GUI (at least if the app is GPL), which is where Flash is best at. I don't see it replacing the proprietary plugin any time soon, though -- the next version (8.5, currently available as public alpha) will be a huge step.

I'm always amazed by the irrational comments each time something Flash related gets posted. I hate Flash banners, too. I also hated the animated GIF banners we had before Flash, especially combined with MIDI sound. Sometimes I think it's too easy to get started with Flash for people who have no idea what they're doing, but that doesn't mean it's inherently bad (I'm sure some will disagree). Accessibility is an issue, because unlike HTML, it takes extra effort to support it. And yeah, the official plugin is proprietary, but it's being worked on. Other than that, most of the stuff I read is either nonsense or due to improper use (which includes both how it's done and whether Flash is the right tool for the job in the first place).