[theora] Fwd: [whatwg] Suddenly, ~40% of IE users get HTML5 Theora with no effort

[Remco]

On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 00:31 +0100, Christopher Blizzard wrote: 
> On 02/06/2010 09:01 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> > For that same reason I think it would be awesome if Remco continued
> > with his native Flash implementation. There will always be people in
> > some non-html5 browser that will not have silverlight installed and
> > not have java, but will have flash - it's those that you will reach!
> >
> >    
> 
> Is that something like Theora as a native flash codec?  I heard once 
> they had pluggable codecs or something, but I didn't realize that 
> someone was working on that.
> 
> --Chris

Well, 'working on it' is a bit of an overstatement, but I've been
interested in this. It's not possible to access native libs in Flash.
Alchemy is something close. It compiles a C or C++ library to Flash
bytecode using LLVM.

I'm considering two possible development routes:

     1. Implement a Theora decoder in ActionScript or hAxe, much like
        Cortado for Java. I'd rather use hAxe, since it's a completely
        free development environment. This is obviously a lot of work,
        but it could mirror Cortado's design. 
     2. Compile libtheora with Alchemy to Flash bytecode and use it with
        ActionScript. Alchemy's generated bytecode is supposed to be an
        order of magnitude faster than what you get with ActionScript.
        This seems like less work to me, but that's not counting jumping
        through Adobe hoops. Also, it's beta.

Both hAxe and Alchemy have a Vorbis project.

-- 
Remco