Adobe's Open Screen Project

[Posted May 1, 2008 by corbet]

Adobe has announced the "Open Screen Project," which seems mainly oriented toward getting flash players onto everybody's phones. One of the outcomes, though, is that the licensing restrictions on the Flash specifications (which prevented people from using those specifications to make competing Flash players) have been lifted. The Flash 9 specification can now be downloaded from this page.

Whither RTMP?

Posted May 1, 2008 13:54 UTC (Thu) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] (3 responses)

I've looked through the specs briefly, but don't see any documentation of the RTMP protocol
(which is used for streaming flash video).

What RTMP?

Posted May 2, 2008 15:03 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

FLV videos are usually served by way of simple HTML downloads.
For instance, you can easily grab any Youtube video with wget.
(Figuring out the URL is the most difficult part of _that_ exercise.)

What RTMP?

Posted May 2, 2008 20:28 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

FLV is what is used by youtube and such, but I do not believe it's used by many flash-based
video players.

What RTMP?

Posted May 5, 2008 2:47 UTC (Mon) by Mithrandir (guest, #3031) [Link]

That's what the Firefox addon "UnPlug" is for.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2254

Adobe's Open Screen Project

Posted May 1, 2008 13:55 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (1 responses)

It will be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be. I'm also curious how
open everything will be due to whatever patent restrictions exist.

Adobe's Open Screen Project

Posted May 1, 2008 14:00 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

From my brief scan of the Flash spec if you search for "licen" (to 
account for spelling differences) you'll find mention of a couple of 
patented codecs (MP3 and Sorenson from memory for example) that *can* be 
used and are flagged as things for developers to be aware of.   My (very) 
brief reading was that these are not required for Flash content.

Opening Flash?

Posted May 1, 2008 14:01 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (4 responses)

...and we have Microsoft's Silverlight to thank for this, I presume. Sad, that a Microsoft
product was more open than Adobe's.

Anyhow, now that the spec is open, there are less excuses for not having a good FOSS flash
player. Hopefully Gnash and SWFdec will be given a push forward following this announcement
and info.

Opening Flash?

Posted May 1, 2008 17:05 UTC (Thu) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting comment by Benjamin Otte, author of swfdec (afaik):
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/swfdec/2008-May/001...

Summary: Adobe's announcement is just a PR-thing.

Opening Flash?

Posted May 1, 2008 17:17 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting, thanks for the link. I had no idea that reverse-engineering had produced such a
complete spec.

I wonder how exact it is. Well, I guess we can now compare it to the official version.

Opening Flash?

Posted May 1, 2008 18:21 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

It just goes to prove that reverse engineering the format is just one step. Getting everything
implemented sufficiently correct and behaving as expected is the other piece that takes a lot
of trial and error.

Opening Flash?

Posted May 5, 2008 11:47 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

Ditto .net and Java really, too.

Adobe's Open Screen Project

Posted May 1, 2008 14:03 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

They have also opened the FLV protocol for synchronised streaming of 
audio and video.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Adobe's Open Screen Project

Posted May 2, 2008 7:03 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

That's nice, though a bit late since the format has already been completely reverse-engineered
and documented.

Now how about Shockwave?  (Despite some deliberate naming confusion introduced by the
Macromedia/Adobe marketing department, Shockwave is entirely different than Flash.)  I had the
misfortune of having to use some Shockwave courseware for a General Chemistry class last year.