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Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the getting-with-the-program dept.

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."

8 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Great by suso · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    1. Re:Great by Mental+Maelstrom · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, it will help a lot. Using the Open Screen Project page, I just discovered a link to the SWF file format specification, version 9 is available for download without having to accept any NDA's.

  2. Re:64 bit inux perhaps? by verbatim_verbose · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  3. Re:SVG by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Somehow I don't think SWF would be very useful to, say, KDE4. Or to just about any scenario where you want a static image that scales to any resolution. I've yet to see flash used for static images anywhere, for good reason. The reports of the demise of SVG are highly exaggerated.

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  4. Re:too little, too late by Ilgaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 colour correction.

    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.

  5. More details by jaaron · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Who said Freedom was Fair?
    1. Re:More details by nickull · · Score: 4, Informative

      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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      "Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
  6. Re:too little, too late by mjbkinx · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 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 that can even compile for other targets as well (the Neko and generated Javascript, with PHP support in the works), among other tools.

    Also, the Flex SDK is already open and works on Linux (it's Java). Finally, their (proprietary) Flexbuilder for Linux is currently a public alpha.