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Posted by SpaceGirl on 08/01/07 10:22
On Aug 1, 10:41 am, Toby A Inkster <usenet200...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
wrote:
> SpaceGirl wrote:
> > Toby A Inkster wrote:
>
> >> The SWF specs have been published, but:
>
> >> 1. You need to agree to a fairly restrictive licence,
> >> promising not to use them to build a competing
> >> player; and
>
> >> 2. FLV is not included in the published specs.
>
> > FLV can't be, as Adobe have to license the codecs it uses. They can't
> > give that away for free.
>
> True -- but it was their choice of codec that made this the case. There
> are plenty of other codecs they could have used with fewer licencing
> issues, such as MPEG-4 AVC or Ogg Theora.
>
> >> The Flash Player is only available for Windows 98 and above, Mac OS X
> >> and x86 versions of Linux, and because of the restrictions on the spec
> >> licence, third parties can't use it to produce players for other
> >> platforms -- they need to reverse engineer the format instead, making
> >> it effectively no better than a closed, proprietary format.
>
> > At the same time this is a good thing. It has kept the player extremely
> > small and fast. OpenSource isn't all good! :)
>
> I mentioned reverse engineering above: Gnash is a project to produce a
> GPL SWF player. It's got near 100% Flash 7 support.
>
> File sizes:
>
> flash-plugin-7.0.63-1.i386.rpm 2 192 140 bytes
> gnash-0.8.0-1.fc6.i386.rpm 1 595 251 bytes
> gnash-plugin-0.8.0-1.fc6.i386.rpm 21 331 bytes
> (Gnash Total) 1 616 582 bytes
FlashPlayer 9 (which includes AVM2.0 and AS3.0) is 2,447,560 bytes.
Given Flash 9 is significantly different than earlier versions of
Flash, and frankly Flash 7 support is kind of meaningless these days.
> Haven't compared their speeds.
Me either, but newer (beta) builds of Flash 9 have hardware
acceleration now, so I suspect the OS versions are very slow by
comparison?
> Free software has a proven track record of staying smaller and faster than
> proprietary software. The only exceptions I can think of are Mozilla-based
Like... what? Apache? Much slower than IIS across the board? Java? One
of the slowest (but most flexible) language on the market :D
> browsers, which are significantly larger and slower than Opera; and
> OpenOffice.org, which is slower, but smaller than Microsoft Office.
Yeah... but don't think it really matters with those programs. Players
and Plugins need to be small to encourage users to download them. If
they have to download 60Mb just to playback a video, the chances are
they won't :)
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