[Vorbis-dev] Re: [Vorbis] A Macromedia Shockwave Flash-based Ogg player?

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

On 1/16/07, David M. Cotter <me at davecotter.com> wrote:
> i'm not on the flash team, but i can push a little from where i am to
> see what the story is.  From what i understand, a major goal of flash
> is to 1) keep the size down to the minimum and 2) not have it depend
> on anything.
>
> because of 2, we can't have folks having to install XiphQT
> separately, it would have to come as part of the flash installer.
> because of 1, we are loath to include anything more than absolutely
> necessary.  considering we already have an audio solution built into
> flash, it becomes less than absolutely necessary to include yet
> another audio solution.

Greetings, Mr. Cotter

I believe, there's some misconceptions on your statements.

If you meant the resulting .swf files... those only carry the included
data (images, sound, animation sequences, etc); no actual decoders.
If you meant the Flash player, as I suspect you did, understand that
it's there that the decoding is done, thus where the playback
libraries are.

No one would have to install the XiphQT (as you said) if there was
support for all (or some) of our formats in the Flash player.  Also,
XiphQT is a pack of components for Quicktime, which is pretty much
only useful for Mac OS X users.

Furthermore, you say that Flash has only one audio solution included.
This is wrong.  Flash 8 supports four different "solutions" for audio,
and two for video.  It's up for the Flash author to decide which
encoding s/he would like to use in their resulting SWF application.
Take notice, as well, that half of those solutions are patented and
require a license for use within Flash applications.

Neither Vorbis (general audio), nor Speex (for speech), nor OggPCM
(PCM data), nor FLAC (lossless audio), nor Theora (video) require any
kind of license or royalties.  However, Macromedia (now Adobe) has
showed no official interest for any of those formats, even though they
provide more advantages than their licensing conditions (better
quality, streaming support, etc).

We can't force Adobe to include support for the Ogg family on Flash.
We can however try to negotiate with them, and offer our help in the
implementation process if need be.

If there is a chance that you may get in touch with the "big guys",
and you would be kind enough to try it, we would appreciate it very
much.

Best wishes,
Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves