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."

Comments

Great

[suso]

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

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:Great

[Mental Maelstrom]

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.

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:Defence agains silverlight?

[maxwell demon]

who needs it (silverlight I mean)?

Microsoft.

Re:Defence agains silverlight?

[nahdude812]

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 a web browser on all major OS's, or as a desktop application on all major OS's.

It's quick and easy to create a single application which runs just about anywhere - much simpler than creating a standard desktop application. So as a developer, as long as you don't need something high-end enough to rule out Flex as a platform (ie, 3d games, etc), there's really very little reason to not currently be developing for Flex.

Microsoft knows this, Flash crept up on them and turned into a serious threat to their monopoly. They're probably really kicking themselves for having distributed it for a while, cinching the install base.

Silverlight is Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction to the realization that this sleeping giant is waking up. It's their attempt to maintain the lock-in they currently own. This is why they're now shoving Silverlight down your throat. For example, my Microsoft Office 2008 on OS X had a "Critical Update," whose description was vague, and did not contain a link to the full details. Installing it because of course that's what you do with critical updates, it turns out to have simply been an install of Silverlight, even though there was no way for me to have known this in advance.

I went to a Silverlight developer conference, and I saw Microsoft employees showing off example applications, including walking us through the creation of these applications. I can say without a doubt that Flex is substantially easier to work with; in the time and lines of code they created a simple slideshow with fading transitions that reads filenames out of a CSV, at the Adobe conference, they'd made a slideshow with thumbnails, transitions, varying timers, pause, manual navigation, and even a carousel mode, which read data from a CSV, SOAP, WSDL, or REST web service.

Like many things, Microsoft is putting just enough effort into Silverlight to make it look competitive.

FWIW, I asked during the Silverlight developer conference a few months ago what the current install base of Silverlight was, and the only response they were willing to give is, "If you don't use it, nobody will install it." That means practically nobody.

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: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: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:64 bit inux perhaps?

[verbatim_verbose]

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

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.

Interesting how things change

[acb]

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.

Re:SVG

[Gavagai80]

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.

Re:too little, too late

[Ilgaz]

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.

More details

[jaaron]

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

[nickull]

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.

Re:More details

[delt0r]

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 having a open avi format but you still have to pay for the codecs that we use.

Adobe IMO has a good reputation (ps and pdf). But there nothing about this i can find on the website. I really would like some more information about the IP issues. Without a clear statment about the IP involved it will be difficult to implement a true GPL 3 version at the least.

Re:More details

[delt0r]

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 flash? Or does free just mean Adobe part of the license fees are waived?

Example: can I use flash (mpeg/VP6) as the movie format without paying license fees in a commercial video game? Note that no GPL code could be used of course.

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:too little, too late

[mjbkinx]

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.

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: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: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:JS/AS Runtimes getting absurdly fast

[naz404]

The slow implementations you're talking about are due to the retarded programming of the game authors. Most people in Flash come from a designer background and not a programming background, hence inefficient code. as for implementations of Flash getting faster and faster, the demo of Flash 10 they showed at Adobe Max was fast enough to run Quake 1 in fullscreen! Check the 2nd video in the link below from sneak peeks at Adobe Max in Chicago last year: http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-max-chicago-sneak-peeks/

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.

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