Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)

Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)

Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:20 UTC (Wed) by timschmidt (guest, #38269)
Parent article: Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)

OK. I understand that learning to work with a new API and (re)writing code to that API is a lot of work. But these guys look to be _trying_ to write to non-portable APIs that cover only a fraction of the target audience. Come one! X11 over SDL (especially considering that flash runs on MacOS and Windows), ALSA over gstreamer or SDL? VFL v1?

It may not be their intention to actually make it possible for people to use the plugin, but they should at least be thinking about what the API landscape will look like a year or three down the road (Flash 7, for example, was released in Sep 2003). VFL v1 will be long gone. X11 will be around, but will have drastically different capabilities and performance characteristics.

And coding for ALSA is just plain wrong... When flash tells ALSA to fire up it's stereo sound card, how's ALSA supposed to know that I like browser-related audio to filter through my USB VoIP headphones at 35% volume (and actual VoIP calls at 75%) and not through the network-connected 7.1 audio system in the living room? ALSA's there to make the sound cards do their thing (along with OSS and whatever other OSs offer) - it's not for most applications to play with directly.

I'll be suprised if, in two years time, the commercial flash 9 player works any better on Linux than it does today (which is to say that it works most of the time (except audio) for a few users with the right hardware, so long as they have an old c++ library hanging around, a depricated audio subsystem (or it's successor's legacy compatibility interface) enabled, the right sort of GUI (this means _you_ PDAs and thin clients), and run the OS of Adobe's choice).

---

(Log in to post comments)