[MPlayer-users] Re: Shockwave Flash codecs/specs

[Jonathan Rogers]

rcooley wrote:
> Umm, I wasn't putting-down the GPLed flash library, just letting 
> everyone know that it's only up to v3.  Frankly, I despise flash, and 
> have almost no interest in it, what-so-ever, so I'm definately not the 
> guy to work on updating it.

I don't despise Flash itself, just how it is normally (ab)used and that 
it is proprietary. Specifically, it is almost invariably used to replace 
web pages with unnecessary embellishments. However, the capabilities of 
Flash could be quite useful for some purposes, like the one in question.

Supposedly, a combination of SVG, SMIL, and several other open standards 
could provide the same capabilities, but I'm not holding my breath. 
Before such standards are widely implemented, a Free implentation of 
Flash could be very useful if it kept up with the proprietary one. In 
the last point lies the difficulty. I'm sure the Wine and Samba 
developers could tell us about that.

Jonathan Rogers