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

[Tor-Einar Jarnbjo]

oddsock schrieb:
> this is extremely good news for a few reasons :
And the chopping sound is probably fixed, at least when I test it on my 
computer. High CPU load is still a problem though. I have to check if 
there is a way to profile Flash applications ...
> 2. Adobe's existing support for streaming media from Shoutcast/Icecast 
> servers is *horrible*.  If it works (big IF), then it has all sorts of 
> crazy effects - try connecting a flash player to a icecast stream, and 
> even if you stop the player (sound.stop()),it will continue to 
> download the stream until it's local cache is full - and that is quite 
> huge.  Adobe's streaming code is just bad...all over bad..and so far 
> they've refused to fix it.
Stopping a stream shouldn't be too difficult. I'm using 
flash.net.URLStream to download data and if it's close() method is doing 
what it's supposed to do, it should also stop the stream completely.
> 3. There is no support for metadata synchronization.  This makes 
> internet radio players have to do crazy things in order to sync the 
> metadata to the stream.
As soon as I add support for chained Vorbis streams (see later), it 
should not be a great problem to propagate new metadata to the GUI.
> 4. this brings a whole new reason why internet broadcasters can switch 
> to streaming in vorbis.  The biggests complaint (by far) is the fact 
> that a specialized player was required to listen to a vorbis stream.  
> If a broadcaster can switch to vorbis without alienating their clients 
> (by requiring they install a new media player) there aren't a whole 
> lot more barriers to entry anymore then.
Well, I am really concerned about CPU load. My computer is not brand new 
(Athlon 64 3400), but playing a 44,1kHz stereo stream causes the CPU 
load to hover around 60% and that is probably not acceptable for most 
purposes. The playback is also chopping if other tasks are done 
simultaneously. Perhaps the bytecode interpreter in Flash 10 is better, 
we'll soon see or my code is probably optimizable as well.

> A few things to think about :
>
> 1. without seeing the actionscript, I'll assume that it's fairly 
> simple to grab a stream rather than just a file on the server-side.
Sure, that shouldn't be a problem. The Vorbis stream is loaded from a 
URL and if the web server delivers a static file or streamed data should 
be irrelevant for the player.
> If you need help testing with icecast, I'll be more than happy to help 
> test it out.
I need to fix a few other things and bugs first, but as soon as I am 
satisfied, I will of course need testers :)
> 2. handling chained bitstreams.  This is critical to streaming from 
> icecast.  I assume since this is a port from jorbis (I think), that 
> should be covered.
No, it's not, but not difficult to add. The ActionScript code is a port 
of J-Ogg (www.j-ogg.de) and not Jorbis.
> 3. source code!
Of course.

Regards,

Tor