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.

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: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.

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: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?

[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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