[MPlayer-users] Flash Files?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 02:57:21PM +0100, Timo Teifel wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hi there,
> 
> I was wondering if it's possible to play SWF Movies with MPlayer...
> I normally wouldn't think so, cause I thought it's a vectorbased format;
> and thus completely different to other video codecs, but I accidently
> discovered that the RealPlayer for Linux plays these files - although
> without sound (mp3). MPlayer however plays the mp3 stream, with
> no picture...
> Since you support some of the RealVideo-Formats, I was wondering 
> if it would be possible to play SWF files also....
> 
> I was thinking of simple videos, without interactive control; like the
> ones from http://ugo.mondominishows.com/mondo/htf.html
> 
> I don't know how, but anybody managed to download these, so now
> I got those SWF files... and I want to watch them without using a 
> browser... 
> If you need samples I can upload a few... 

I'd actually been thinking about this before, and since there is no
working free SWF player, I think it would be nice to support full
interactive controls. This would also provide a good opportunity to
implement the new stuff in the input layer that will be needed for
flexible interactive control in other stuff like dvdnav. We talked
about it once before, and IMHO the correct way is to have multiple
contexts for keybinding, and global keybindings that can override in
all contexts. I'd be happy to elaborate if anyone cares to discuss it.

As far as interpreting the SWF data, there's a primitive, rather junky
player under GPL (or some other free license -- I forget) that does
the basics, so it could probably be used at least as a template for
the code.

Rich