Swfdec: development slowed

I have joined the Swfdec mail list and posted about my experiences, with a request that the latest Swfdec could return to linking direct with external ffmpeg (and not with gstreamer-ffmpeg). Also sound selection used to allow 'alsa' selection, currrently doesn't (and sound doesn't work).

The main developer Benjamin responded, and basically he is focussed on developing it for his particular needs. He has Gstreamer and a particular sound setup, etc. He explained that he is not interested in maintaining anything else, and besides, development has slowed, almost stopped. Well, his words:

The reason why Swfdec does not support more than one sound system,
HTTP backend or multimedia system is very simple: The main
developer(s) (read: me) only uses one of each and wants to use his
time to improve the Flash player instead of supporting multiple
backends of a non-working player. So every backend that wasn't updated
whenever necessary was thrown out. It's not hard to add back, it's
just that the Swfdec devs don't want to keep it working.

That said, active Swfdec development has pretty much stopped, so
you'll likely not see any new features in the near future anyway.

So, to move forward with this in our puppies, one of the Puppy developers competent in C coding would have to take it on-board.

When I release Quirky 003, you can try it out. There are two main issues:

1.
I'm using Swfdec-mozilla 0.6.0 as this is required for Swfdec 0.6.8-patched. Plays videos ok, but the control buttons are weird, like if you choose to replay. Probably the latest Swfdec-mozilla has improved the user interface.

2.
I had to compile Swfdec 0.6.8-patched with an older Ffmpeg (2009-02-13) as the latest ffmpeg out of svn caused SeaMonkey to crash whenever tried to view a Flash video.

Note, if you google around, these two problems, no sound and browser crashing, are common, even with latest Swfdec and Swfdec-mozilla. There are also reports of excessive CPU usage in later versions.

I came across one person's report that the 0.6.8 version of Swfdec is the best.

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Comments

Swfdec???
Username: Jota
Here is something to think about [b]swfdec[/b]... I've tried to install [b]swfdec[/b] in a Kubuntu box, and it gives me this: [code] # aptitude install swfdec-mozilla Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: dbus-x11{a} devicekit-disks{a} gconf2{a} gconf2-common{a} gnome-keyring{a} gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg{a} gstreamer0.10-plugins-base{a} gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly{a} gvfs{a} gvfs-backends{a} liba52-0.7.4{a} libarchive1{a} libatasmart4{a} libavahi-glib1{a} libavformat52{a} libbluetooth3{a} libcdio-cdda0{a} libcdio-paranoia0{a} libcdio7{a} libdvdnav4{a} libdvdread4{a} libgconf2-4{a} libgcr0{a} libgdu0{a} libgnome-keyring0{a} libgp11-0{a} libgudev-1.0-0{a} libgvfscommon0{a} libid3tag0{a} libidl0{a} libmpeg2-4{a} liborbit2{a} libpam-gnome-keyring{a} libpolkit-agent-1-0{a} libpolkit-backend-1-0{a} libproxy0{a} libsgutils2-2{a} libsidplay1{a} libsoup-gnome2.4-1{a} libsoup2.4-1{a} libswfdec-0.8-0{a} libswscale0{a} libtwolame0{a} obex-data-server{a} policykit-1{a} policykit-1-gnome{a} swfdec-mozilla 0 packages upgraded, 47 newly installed, 0 to remove and 121 not upgraded. Need to get 6,915kB of archives. After unpacking 34.4MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n [/code] libbluetooth, obex, etc, etc?? Someone is crazy here, or the swfdec people, or the Ubuntu one's!! And, after all that 34Mb extra load, I've found that YouTube does not work! :-( So returning to the good old Flash 10, only 10Mb size and it works... of course. ;-)

Tags: puppy