Re: [Gnash] Re: Gnash Video Codecs?

[Rob Savoye]

John Dowdell wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, "ann" wrote:

  I assume this isn't an official Adobe statement ? :-)

> One other point, as long as I've delurked: The concern about Gnash that
> I see among people working with SWF is the risk to predictable
> clientside capability. Lots of us saw how VRML was harmed by varying
> audience capabilities, and although HTML/JS/CSS is very useful today its
> progress has still been held back significantly by differences among
> rendering engines. I think there's room for both "spec-based" and
> "implementation-based" web technologies -- doesn't all have to be one or
> the other -- but the resistance you see among the grassroots to Gnash is
> the concern that any widespread adoption would make their own work
> harder, their own support costs greater.

  I see more support than resistance. We've stated many times, we work
hard at maintaining compatibility with the existing Flash players. We
focus more on what your player does than what the spec says most of the
time, since they don't always agree. :-) The resistance I see are from
the same people that claim Linux sucks cause it won't run M$ Office. The
supporters are glad they have a solution that runs on all platforms,
including embedded ones and 64 bit ones.

  If you want to see better conformance with your own Flash player, the
#1 way this could be achieved is by making a public statement that it's
OK for Gnash developers to use the IDE for generating movies we can use
for test cases, and that's it's also OK for us to use the Adobe plugin
to compare the test case's results without any issues about licensing.
It's incredibly inefficient for Gnash developers to rely on other people
to test things for us. Since we're bringing Flash support to many
platforms that have none, all we can do is increase the usage of Flash,
which can only be good for Adobe.

> (The SVG folks are still looking for a popular rendering engine,

  I think our hands are full right now with just Gnash. SVG is cool, but
we have a ways to go with just Flash right now as our primary focus.

        - rob -