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Adobe To Open Real-Time Messaging Protocol
synodinos writes "Adobe has
announced plans
to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol specification, which is
designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between
Adobe Flash Platform technologies. This move that has followed the opening of
the AMF spec has been
received with varying degrees of enthusiasm from the RIA community."
..."Abobe"?!
Seems that someone confused their b with their d. It happens a lot with kids in preschool and kindergarten.
I knew that the Slashdot readership was getting younger, but I didn't realize HOW young!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is good news for the haXe community.
PDF isn't a proprietary format. It's ISO 19005-1:2005
Which proves two things:
GP doesn't know WTF they're talking about... ...but they're right. PDF is an open standard, implemented by other vendors in a way that sucks, yet Acrobat still sucks.
In fact, Adobe has never really been known for performance. For another fun test, take a Flash video, download the FLV, and play it in any other player. Compare CPU usage.
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Not really.
First, it's got the same problem as any other proprietary application which opens specs -- there's only one implementation, and that implementation is proprietary. Most specs at least include a reference implementation.
More importantly, how long have the specs been open? Last I checked, they were only open for developing anything but a client/viewer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm not sure there's any point to this, since the Red5 guys have already documented and implemented the protocol. And Wowza has a fantastic implementation, even though it's not open source. If nothing else, I'd like to see "Abobe" explains the fucked-up connection handshaking. "Send me any ol' 1500 bytes! Ok great, you're connected!"
I think it's good that some companies, like Adobe, are realizing it makes good business sense to open up these protocols. However let's also be aware that Adobe is perfectly willing to tighten the screws further in other areas when they feel like THAT makes business sense. Anyone who (like me) uses any of their CS3 or CS4 products has dealt with this.
Actually, I should say the first install of CS3 or CS4 goes pretty well, and activation is painless. But if you've got it at home and at work - which is perfectly acceptable according to their EULA - then have a computer suddenly die, prepare to invest a lot of time in trying to get the licensing sorted out just so you can do your work.
So my (long-winded) point is: Good for Adobe, but let's not give them too much credit for this.
#DeleteChrome
May 2008 was when Adobe relicensed it to permit development of viewers.
The big parts not in that spec are Spark (the video codec, which I don't think Adobe CAN open up, I'm not sure it's all theirs) and RTMP. Now it's just Spark.
The AC original poster is a moron.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Search on google for: gnash clean room
What you will find is that Adobe made it difficult to legally work on an open source viewer, and that the specs that exist are either (1) leaked, and therefore it is questionable whether you can legally use them, or (2) from a clean room reverse engineering.
From: http://lwn.net/Articles/270056/
Gnash development has been done using a Clean room reverse engineering technique. By agreeing to the license for the Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash player, a developer gives up the right to develop a competing product.
From: http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30
Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.
Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.
From: http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/21
Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."
Amen to this. This issue is the only reason I rip Hulu videos instead of just viewing them directly. The ads aren't that intrusive and ripping is less convenient than putting up with a few ads.
The problem is that on my HTPC (An older machine, Athlon XP 2800+), the Flash-based player is unable to play back video at full speed. mplayer, on the other hand, plays back ripped Hulu videos with plenty of CPU to spare.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
True. The recent improvements to Okular and Evince have made viewing pdfs on Linux really nice (for me anyways, and I have a ton of pdfs). Pages load fast, display nicely, and don't seriously tax my cpu, even on my slower, older, single core laptop. Some of these are the same pdfs that tax my faster (and with 3 times the memory) Windows XP desktop running Acrobat Reader.
On windows, try Foxit Reader. If you must stick with acrobat reader, disable all the plug-ins you don't need. They massively increase the loading time.
Not a sentence!
...embed a chat room in a PDF and talk to anyone who has a copy of the same PDF open.
Technoli
HTTPHeaders can be as useful as anything else.
It will list the full URL of every html, image, css, js, and flv requested from the server for the current page.
Simply copy the flv URL and paste stright back into the browser ... instant save-as prompt and your done :-)
I'm dyslexic you intense clog!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Spark is just another name for H.263; you can get the spec from ITU. The undocumented proprietary codec is VP6, but ffmpeg has a reverse-engineered decoder.
Um, RTMP is not a chat protocol. It is a protocol for stateful connections with multiplexed streams for downloading large amounts of media with real-time responses and quality of service requirements. It is what the Flash Player uses to download audio and video from servers. See Wikipedia. Next time, look up the topic before spouting off.
I've written code that deals with PDF, both in terms of parsing and rendering it, as well as generating it. PDF is a great format. It certainly doesn't have the difficulties associated with, for instance, PostScript. Adobe's products might have poor performance but this is not due to the file format, which is NOT proprietary but actually quite well-documented.
I have no idea what sorts of crazy things happen inside Adobe's code. Suffice it to say, none of that is mandated by the PDF format.
And Nellymoser, one of the audio codecs.
It's good that they're opening up RTMP but they just released RTMFP/Stratus which looks like it's going to be very interesting. I want to create a system based on top of RTMFP but I don't want that system to be at the mercy of Adobe. Hopefully someone (like the guys behind Red5) will reverse engineer the Stratus interface.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.