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

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.

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.