[MPlayer-users] Flash Files?

[mwmiller at columbus.rr.com]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 02:57:21PM +0100, Timo Teifel <tml at teifel.net> wrote:
> 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;

Not to mention that many of them have decision forks and
random/arbitrary points, scrolling menus, etc...

But maybe 'movies' like exuberance.swf could be played straight through
from beginning to end, forks be damned.  Unfortunately, I'm afraid I
can't help much with the actual coding, but I can provide some links for
research.

There is *some* code available for interpreting SWF:
http://www.openswf.org/code.html
It really, *really* needs work to get anywhere near useable in the
general sense, though.

Also, the official SWF spec is here:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/flash_file_format_specification.pdf
(Wait a few minutes to pretend you're clicking through a lot of
obnoxious license agreements, *then* download it.)

I have great faith that anything developed by the mplayer d00ds couldn't
*possibly* be worse than Macromedia's bog-slow Netscape plugin.  ;)
-- 
Matthew W. Miller, Linux kiddie
mwmiller at columbus.rr.com