Swfdec 0.5.5

I just noticed I haven’t blogged in a long time about Swfdec development. That might be because it’s been churning along as usual. Pekka and me are the most awesome C developers in the Free software world, more and more Flash files start working and we discover more and more things we do not support yet.

Yesterday I cut a 0.5.5 release in time for Gnome 2.21.4, so people can play with Swfdec inside Gnome. As people might know, I proposed Swfdec-Gnome for Gnome 2.22. Note that this doesn’t mean shipping a browser plugin, but a thumbnailer and standalone player. That’s stuff that the non-free plugin doesn’t give you. And thumbnailed directories just look gorgeous:

What makes this release somewhat exciting is that a lot of Flash files seem to almost be working. For example, the seek bar in Youtube works since this release. Also, we managed to make the new Youtube player almost work. You can at least watch Youtube videos embedded on other pages again! Also, FlowPlayer and the JW player work now and with it video services that use it, such as Dailymotion. The cool thing about FlowPlayer is that it is Free Software, so we almost have a Free stack for doing a video webservice in Free software – the codec is missing again. I’ve also got mails that CNN video, AOL video, Tudou and some others I already forgot also work. Google video doesn’t work yet, so there’s still something to do. Anyway, if you’ve previously had problems with the Flash file of your choice, it seems like a good day to try again.

On completely realted news, I’ve started getting involved with porting Swfdec to embedded devices, in particular running Swfdec on DirectFB, as a lot of embedded people seem to think using Flash as their UI is a good idea, because it’s flashy and has a lot of nice developer tools. I guess there’s a good thing and a bad thing about that. The good thing is that they use Free software for playback, the bad thing is that they still prefer a closed format due to the better editing environment. I guess Free software needs a GUI creation framework that is better than the current Glade. I wonder if Inkscape could be made to create UIs.
One good and one bad thing is also what I can say about running Cairo and Swfdec on embedded devices: The good thing is that it certainly is possible, the bad thing is that there’s still a lot of optimization work needed, just like on desktops. The hardware rendering capabilities just aren’t available to applications and they end up doing software rendering. Even though if they were available, everything would work at least 10x faster. Exciting times ahead I guess.