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

[Tor-Einar Jarnbjo]

Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves schrieb:

> I'm open for any suggestion on how to get the action rolling.  Right
> now, I am the one dealing with marketing and promoting Xiph's
> projects, but in regards to big corporations, I have little knowledge
> on how to deal with the matter.

Perhaps it's a better idea to roll the action yourself instead of 
spending (vasting?) time on trying to convince other companies to do the 
work? Right now, audio stream producers obviously have no requirement 
for switching to anything else but MP3, WMA or AAC. Client support is 
widespread enough to not justify spending efforts on anything else and 
license costs for any of the proprietary codecs are not high enough to 
make it rentable to spend time and labour on configuring, setting up and 
maintaining open source solutions compared to buying an out-of-the-box 
streaming solution from e.g. Microsoft.

I've been thinking about how at least the client side solution to this 
problem could be. There are several ways of embedding code or small 
programs on a web page, all with different advantages and drawbacks:

- Java applets are platform independent, runs on virtually any platform 
and/or browser combination, but require Java to be installed (and 
properly integrated with the browser) on the client computer to work. If 
Java is not installed, the installation is not particulary trivial for 
inexperienced users, may require administrator privileges under Windows 
and the download size is relatively huge. There are already a few Vorbis 
decoders available for Java and integrating them in an applet is 
trivial. I managed to tweek my Java Vorbis player into less than 10kB of 
code, so applet download size should not be an issue.

- Flash movies are platform independet, run on at least Windows, Mac and 
Linux (and hence cover a vast majority of the intended audience). The 
Flash player is already installed on most computers and if not, the 
installation procedure is in most cases trivial and easy to perform, 
also for inexperienced users. Drawbacks are of course that Flash does 
not have native support for Vorbis and that the poor-performing 
ActionScript engine requires much CPU power to run an ActionScript 
implementation of a Vorbis decoder. Download size is also here not a 
great issue, the ActionScript Vorbis decoder itself is only 20-25kB when 
compiled.

- ActiveX controls run only in IE on Windows (is ActiveX available at 
all in IE for Mac??) and are considered by some as a potential security 
threat. If the control is available and signed by a somewhat seriosly 
looking entity (e.g. Xiph.org), I would however assume that most users 
allow the control to be installed, without conserning too much about 
security issues. Implementing an ActiveX control for Vorbis streaming 
and playback should not be particulary difficult and the control is only 
downloaded once when first used. Download size should hence also here 
not be a great issue.

- In addition, there are a few other plugin architectures, most both 
browser and platform specific, making it rather difficult to easily 
provide support for a broad audience.

One idea my brain is currently working on, is to implement both Java, 
Flash and ActiveX versions of a kind of streaming, decoding and playback 
engine without its own user interface. This would make it possible to 
wrap everything in a JavaScript library and make it feasible for web 
content authors to integrate Vorbis streaming on any web side, requiring 
only either Java, Flash or ActiveX to be available on the client 
computer. The JavaScript wrapper would decide which "core engine" to 
actually use depending on which software extension are actually 
available.  It is becoming more and more common anyway to hide the 
actual playback component and use HTML for the player GUI and JavaScript 
to interact with the player engine and this would be required by my 
approach, but not necessarily a show-stopper for common usage of the 
software suite. Feedback on this idea is extremely appreciated.

Tor