Posted by Toby A Inkster on 07/31/07 13:36

Travis Newbury wrote:

> Do you want the player to be open source? Adobe (and Macromedia
> before them) have always given out the specs for creating SWF files.

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.

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.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 40 days, 16:47.]

demiblog 0.2.2 Released
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/07/29/demiblog-0.2.2/

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