[MPlayer-users] Flash Files?

[emaillist+mpu at dogphilosophy.net]

On Tuesday 05 November 2002 06:57 am, Timo Teifel 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;
> 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've been itching to find some way of exporting a playing .swf video
("cartoon") to a "standard" video format, so as to be able to create
(S)VCD's of some of the collection of flash cartoons I've downloaded.
It'd be really nice to be able to use -vo yuv4mpeg to dump playing
flash video to an mpeg encoder...

I just tested an .swf in the CVS of mplayer from a few minutes ago - it
looks like MPlayer doesn't recognize there being any kind of "video
stream" in it at all - I was kind of hoping it's just complain about
swf video not being a supported codec, so I could try messing with 
codecs.conf to get it to use the Real libraries to decode...(no, I don't
actually know anything about the .swf format or how the encoding for
the picture elements works...)


As far as I can tell with my minimal understanding of how all of this
works, in order to play flash in mplayer, we'd need:

1)the demuxer to recognize the flash video portion of the .swf file

2)EITHER some way of passing this portion of it to the Real libraries (I 
didn't know RealPlayer handled flash, either...) or to a "native" renderer.

3)almost certainly at least a way of "automatically" pushing buttons when they 
pop up (most of the flash cartoons seem to pause at a 'press to play' button,
to give browsers time to download most or all of the file before starting) -
not knowing anything about .swf, it might be sufficient to ignore any "wait
here for a button press" options...

4)(Maybe?) implementation of -ofps in mplayer - basically, I get the
impression that .swf video isn't "frame based", so the renderer would
have to take 'snapshots' at regular intervals , which would
determine the resulting "frame rate".

I can't personally offer any coding skills to this (nor even any real
understanding of .swf, as is probably laughably obvious from this post) but
I'd be happy to help test and document if someone more code-competent wanted
to try to implement this...