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

[Ross Levis]

For my 2 cents I would say the only way to make this happen is to 
contact the big companies and see if they are willing to incorporate the 
Ogg codecs if someone does the work for free.  I can't imagine them 
saying no.  It may then require a developer visiting their development 
offices and perhaps sitting down for a week.

Any volunteers!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tor-Einar Jarnbjo" <tor-einar at jarnbjo.name>
To: "Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves" <justivo at gmail.com>; <Vorbis at xiph.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Vorbis] A Macromedia Shockwave Flash-based Ogg player?


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