Gordon Messmer wrote:
No, Macromedia is still a proprietary company with plenty of intellectual property to protect. There are likely several patents including Sorenson video codec within the source code, making it impossible to open source.
I've never heard that Sorenson or Quicktime were used in Flash...
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/01/2012217&mode=thread&tid=107 http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/19/190248&mode=thread&tid=107
The format is "open" only if you sign an NDA to receive the specifications. If you read that page, you will see that they allow you to only make apps that output SWF files, not play SWF.Flash 6 is an open, documented file format: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/faq.html Macromedia even suggests on the above page that you search sourceforge.net for "swf" for code that deals with the file format.
The only way to make an open source player is if you reverse engineer it without reading the specifications. IANAL, but I think such a project wouldn't be able to implement the entire Flash specification even with unlimited resources because of a few patents.
http://swfdec.sourceforge.net/
I think this is the most developed of the OSS Flash players. It mentions using mpg123. I not entirely sure, but that may mean be a violation of the Fraunhofer MP3 patent and the (L)GPL patent clause. Aside from this, there's the Sorenson decoder in Flash for playback of movie clips within SWF (you can find a few examples at macromedia.com.) There are probably other patents that we don't know about here.
Regarding PowerPC Linux plugin from Macromedia, I'm still requesting information from the company. It may be impossible if they demand a huge licensing fee for the SDK. We'll see...
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