Flash

So about a month ago Federico blogged a Youtube link again.
That made me wonder about Free Flash decoders and I had a
look around. In the end I started hacking on David‘s Swfdec, since it
has all the goodies: Cairo for beautiful
Graphics, GStreamer for
sound, David’s excellent code (the SWF parsing code is
awesome) and of course it was written in Gnome C.

Long story short: I haven’t had this much fun in hacking for
ages. I think I haven’t done much else in the past month but
hacked on Swfdec and watched lots of stupid Flash movies
lots of times.

So what’s the current state? It’s still very far from
finished since Flash is huge. It’s a graphics framework
(think GDK) with a scripting engine (think Javascript). But
if you’re adventurous, bored or both, feel free to check out
the sources from git://people.freedesktop.org/~company/git/swfdec
and play with them. They might even play back some
weird flash file. For now I’ll continue to make FLash
files work one by one. Next stop: South Park.

PS: Before someone asks: Gnash is low quality, written in
C++ with Boost, requires Copyright assignment, svn doesn’t
even compile and it does less than my current Swfdec, so I
didn’t hack on it.