Flash Team

How about usage of open codecs? That Nellymoser SDK $8K story makes all the users of FMS and Red5 sick. Flash Video is gaining momentum all over the web. How about making one giant leap ahead of Microsoft with help of open source developers?

While I appreciate what your doing... I really wouldn't recommend asking people for features about the Flash player as you've not released the Flash player for Linux yet... you see new features here and you plan to programe those new features into the Flash player... well could delay the Linux Flash player because you need to programe them in there... thats just gonna make the Linux community ( to all those who use Flash player on Linux ) well.... more angry than they are already...

with all of this said... I don't know how you coded the Flash player and again like I said before... I appreciate what you are doing here...

feature request for flash authoring tool and one for designers/animators thats no problem there :p

just my opinion...

anyways my idea is to have a Shared Oject viewer ( for the current swf that is open ) just like we can view cookies in a web browser... I'm not sure to whether they should be editable or not

I'd be awesome if ByteArray.uncompress() provided an option to ignore the checksum contained in the deflated file, or, better yet, if it provided an option to check for a CRC-32 checksum instead of Adler32.

Background: Most ZIP formats (e.g. gzip, PKZip) use CRC-32 to secure integrity, and do not provide an Adler32 checksum at all. The checksums are calculated over the uncompressed file, it's thus impossible for the Flash Player to uncompress files from gzip or PKZIP archives, only because of the different checksums used, which really is a pity.

1) Variable speed playback - The ability to playback swfs and flvs at 1.5x, 2x, 3x etc. without the chipmunk effect on the voice.
2) Improvements to the NetStream object when used with progressive playback--see this blogpost for details: http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2005/12/17/5-reasons-netstream-sucks/

Feature requests?

1 - Open codecs for FLV, or only the big ones will have the chance. Also, -as a buyer of the on2 sdk- their quality is really low. They couldn't ask for such $$$ with their documentation as is.

2 - Did I mention Open codecs for FLV? set an equal playground for big players and small developers?

3 - Oh, let's not forget about: Open codecs!

Support for "right to left" (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) text display and input.

Gaston, I bet you forgot to mention open codecs. The only way to stay on top for Flash Video is open codecs way. So, once again, open codecs!

I have a suggestion, not sure whether it has been mentioned before, but it is about open codecs. For audio I recommend speex, it is far superior to Nelly moser in every aspect (except of generating revenues for NellyMoser Inc.). For video there is theora, h264 and some still-in-development wavelet codecs like dirac and snow. And now, that you have one of the biggest experts on open source codecs (Mike Melanson) in your team, you should get away from those on2 and NellyMoser codecs and pave the road the next-generation in-browser audo/video applications without limits.

Proposal re my comment above:
public static const ByteArray.CHECKSUM_NONE:int = 0;
public static const ByteArray.CHECKSUM_ADLER32:int = 1;
public static const ByteArray.CHECKSUM_CRC32:int = 2;
public function ByteArray.uncompress(checksum:int = CHECKSUM_ADLER32):void;

Kewl here goes.

Add to the user preferences of the player:

1. the ability to have the sound stop when the control doesnt have focus...ie I go to another tab I dont want to hear production music and atmosphere sounds from the other site.

2. with AS3 came some really cool binary port abilities, but alot of the cool stuff happens under port 1024. why not allow the user to decide if a particular site can access ports below the 1024 limit.

Extending the movieclip loader so that we can do smart loading. At the moment for large numbers of images etc downloading its nessary to have a queue, as clips keep on downloading after they are unloaded. (not sure about this one).

External interface rocks....The flash player is finding its way into more applications, might be time for a review as to what features are available to outside applications.

Flash video is pretty much it on the internet now. But for serverside automatic encoding developers are stuck with either writing a solution using ffmpeg (earlier version of codec) or shelling out some big $$$ on one of your partners product so they can have the latest codecs. Flash has always supported the development community....maybe its time to open the codecs to OS developers, and share the love.

It would be great to be able to specify keyboard shortcuts that will NOT be captured by the browser. For example, pressing ctrl+t in Firefox with focus set to a Flash movie doesn't create a new tab at the moment. By letting the developer decide wich shortcuts to pass thru the Flash Player and on to the browser would improve accessibility and the user experience.

*Improve the ContextMenu to support icons, submenus, and be more sensible to your application look and feel.

Feature Requests?

Just as you expected, i want open codecs. It seems to be disengaged niche in our world. Why so? Low quality, poor documentation, close for modification projects etc. It must not continue anymore.

P.S. Oh... Did I mentioned about Red5?

1. New audio formats like Ogg for starters would be great. However, just general "audio" overhaul would be outstanding. Midi support (receive/send/play).

2. open up security restrictions to be optional - IE: let people use BitmapData object on an RTMP stream if the crossdomain.xml exists on the host server etc. Open up all security lock downs so that the developer/client can decide on the level of security. I understand that the adoption of the player as a bonified platform relies on a solid security model - i get it. However, allowing those features to be "turned off/on" by the developer should be an obvious choice. If the big boy company wants total lock down - great, give em' total lock down. But if joe little guy wants to do something cool, he should have the ability to do so. Again, crossdomain.xml should be a solid solution - let the developer take responsibility.

Also, don't make available the ability to do things in the debugger that aren't available EVER (IE: reference above RTMP example). I wasted 4hrs of dev time only to find out that I was completely screwed. BitmapData object worked on progressive, and so my thought was that naturally, it'd work with RTMP.

3. Change licensing for distribution of the player packaged with software - I dont' know if adobe is looking at this already, but, last time i checked, its distribution/permission policy was completely out of touch with where flash has gone and where we're at today. It should be free to include without having to apply for permission to do so and therefore, subject to possibly unfair treatment between "would be" distributors. It seems odd that you can freely offer the plugin via a web site, but including it in a software package is off-limits until you are subjected to an approval process.

please correct me if this has already been addressed ;)

Strange! Nobody asked for native 3D support so far! But I'm sure thats something that we all like to see.
So I'd like to request 3D support by utilizing OpenGL. We all know it has to come, the question is just when and with which version.

The ability to work with frame lables like we do with frame numbers. IE: MovieClip.getFrameLabel(_currentframe);
MovieClip.getFrameNumber("frameLabel");

Seems to make sense, since we're using gotoAndPlay("FrameLabel"), we should have some ability to retreive label information.

I haven't even touched AS3 with flash IDE, and don't know if this is still even relevent with as3 to be honest.

Customizable context-menu look. I would really like to set icons there and make it look like the application I have it on (even if you have to have the 'about flash player' item.

FileReference.getSelectedFilePath()!!!!

Feature requests:
1. Printing vector and bitmaps in the same printjob where the vectors retain their vector and not print as bitmaps.

2. When displaying the open dialog box for a file to upload I need the ability to load the file into a movie clip before the file is actually uploaded. So I can process the selected image and then POST that file. This way I can preprocess an image file before sending it, would be used on a photo upload site.

3. I need to rotate input text fields that rely on the fonts that are on the users system. I allow my users to create text fields and use the fonts that are on their system, but once the text field is rotated the text dissapears. This does not happen if the font is embedded.

4. Ability to change the tint & alpha of MovieClips and have them still print as vectors.

5. Ability to set the printer to landscape or portrait. You would be surprised how many people emailed me when the new version of CertificateCreator.com went out and I was trapping for people who were printing a certificate that needed to be landscape as portrait. They would email in saying that the didn't know how to set their printers to landscape. I really need to help them out. Now instead of automatically canceling the print job and telling them they weren't in landscape orientation I just alert them and allow them to print and notify them that the print may not look as it was intended. But at 60,000 prints a month through the system you're bound to get quite a lot of people who might find setting their printer orientation a challenge.

5. Any other enhancements to printing, if it can be done in programs like Illustrator it should be exposed to the Flash printing API.

6. If there is integration with Flash & Acrobat then I will need the ability to password protect the Acrobat file that is created. Also, I'll need the ability to limit the number of prints that can be made from the PDF. I'm thinking if I had the ability to print to PDF I would need a way to limit the reach the output PDF file would have, so a user couldn't not print our entire library to PDF and then save a share the PDF.

Skinning for the flash player. Ability to get rid of the rectangle box.

oh and be

- able to get the mime-type of the file before we upload the file to the selected destination WITHOUT needing a server-side script like PHP, JSP etc

- pause the swf... like in VM's like VMWare, Paralells and we can resume it later even after closing and then opening the browser or Flash player

Middle mouse = new tab...
so simple... so good... so "not there"
and open codecs!

forgot to also mention... there should be a way to use flash sites without the need of javascript... because more browsers like Firefox with the extension NoScript and there was that Microsoft EOLA's loss are either disabling javascript or code has changed in javascript

1. Native handling of ColdFusion Structures including Query objects (of course) without the need to translate to XML first. Perhaps a way to natively handle/manipulate the objects/structures directly via E4X within the Flash player itself by some simple calls.

2. Methods for native geographic coordinate methods to map them to image coords and back again directly from the player.

1) more userfriendly security manager and not so many warnings, we get enough warnings from the new M$ $oftware;)

2) the performance of the flashplayer is much better now, but i have still 2 issues
-a) (what i sometimes need:) tweening of large objects is still slowing down the system and the swf
-b) (what i OFTEN need:) parse datas... arrays or xml with loops is still using many system resources, often the swf slows down the system on many datas untill a warning occures, may it would be better to balance that.

3) flash also becomes more and more interesting, like it is since years, for things acctualy the FMS is needed for regarding to the above named not open codec, i whish i had more options there without searching solutions with other languages,players or plugins using beneath flash or without it.

Audio.

I've said it before and i'll say it again.

Audio Audio Audio Audio.

There was a long thread on flashcoders some time ago about which audio features were desirable.

That thread is summarised here :

http://codext.xtyler.com/code/2

For me personally there is one thing above all others :

Writable audio buffers

Self-signed certificates don't work with the
Flash player and FMS (for rtmps) - due to a bug
in the Flash player:

After the dialog window pop-ups asking if you
are going to trust the certificate from unknown
CA, then the rtmps-connection will fail even if
you click on "Yes"

Regards
Alex

PS: Here is how I generated the certificate:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 4096
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -CA ca.crt \
-CAkey ca.key -set_serial 01 -out server.crt

- plugin support like shockwave (xtras) or others...
- "menu" -> download .swf as .exe (desktop application)
- direct streaming support (webTV - liveTV)
- 3D support OpenGL/DirectX like shockwave
- ...

How about a real motion blur effect, as in After Effects?

Multilingual built-in dialogs (or give us the ability to translate any built in dialogs ourselves), like the settings panel and context menu's.

Add the ability to skin the player but more important the ability to skin and control the built in dialogs and context menu's.

Loose the about flash context menu.

- Well, indeed the keywords arguments like in python (http://docs.python.org/tut/node6.html#SECTION006720000000000000000) would be reallllly useful.

- yield return iterator

- lambda functions

1) new LINUX FLASH PLAYER(FP9 to linux or even higher)

[MD] Ion, we're working on this. We hope to have something in beta form by the end of the year. [/MD]

2) OPEN CODECS ( its a must, this can open the door to so many good things ) - or at least, the ability to plug in your own codec.

[MD] I don't understand why so many of you think this is important. The only "open" video codec worth considering in my mind is h.264 and there is a significant per-client licensing fee that you would have to pay in order to use it. What "open" codecs did you have in mind and why would this be so beneficial to you versus the current codecs? If it's simply to make it easier for people build Red5 and not pay Adobe to use Flash Media Server any more, I'd suggest taking another look at the licensing fees for these "open" codecs. I'm sure you'll be quite surprised. And don't look at speculation from open source developers on the licensing - go right to the source. Technologies like LAME, though popular in the open source community, are not legal. To encode or decode MP3 requires payment to Thompson/Fraunhaufer - as an example. [/MD]

3) NATIVE 3D SUPPORT - Microsoft comes with their nice many times name changer : WPF , that thing really looks cool stuff, i saw some 3D RIA applications, they trully are something that current flash player cannot match. And when a designer will see an unmatched oportunity with MS tools for expresing what he thinks/feels, he will follow those tools, without taking into account the ubiquity of THE flash player.

Flash player support for Palm OS is MANDATORY!

[Mike Downey] - Nizamm, I agree that it would be great to have a Flash Player available to Palm OS-powered devices but doing so is completely up to Palm. We make the SDK available for them to create a Player for their devices. So far, they're one of the few companies who have decided not to do so. Microsoft, however, does make a Flash Player available for Windows Mobile. Perhaps you could switch to one of the new Windows Mobile-powered Treos from Palm if you really want a Flash-enabled device?

Making Wheelscroll cross-platform (I mean : working on Mac OS Flash Player and upcoming Linux Player).

Sascha, you can go far beyond FMS that stucks with JavaScript dialect. You can go the most library-rich language in the Universe with Red5. But it still requires open codecs.

BTW h264 mentioned above would be a great choice.

[MD] I suggest learning more about "open" codecs. There are still licensing fees involved, and in the case of h.264, they are quite substantial on a per-client basis. Consider that the Flash Player is the most distributed piece of software on the planet with over 600 million users. There's a lot more to the codec topic than most people realize.

On that note, licensing aside, tell us why specific codecs like h.264 are important to you. How will this help your business or allow you to develop better experiences for your users? We take the subject of adding technologies to the Flash Player very, very seriously so arguments like, "because it will make it easier for us to build Red5 and stop buying Flash Media Server from Adobe" won't resonate very well with us. We need to be focusing on providing value to our customers and the community. [/MD]

sinatosk: that already exists.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

That's what you see when you right-click a flash movie, click "settings", then "advanced".

A better integration with the system for usability:

-A cross platform way to support back button and bookmarking (it is still the holy graal)

-TextField need to support system autofill like standard html textinput does.

-HTML links need to support a:visited.

-Some events to catch basic browser behaviors like increasing / decreasing text size, searching text in the page etc.

-Standard System color when you select text.

This would benefit the RIA area and the flash website area.

Scrollwheel capture on mac (isn't flash marketed as cross-platform) -> same goes for TextFormat.kerning.

1. 3D GPU hardware accelerated graphics, possibly through OpenGL or DirectX. It's a biggie but something that is very overdue for the Flash Player.

2. Please rethink the security restrictions that prevent access to the data of dynamically loaded media (here: livedocs.macromedia.com/labs/as3preview/docs/00000159.html ). Not being able to access bitmap pixels, sound information or apply effects to videos across different domains is a ridiculous security restriction that only limits creativity and frustrates both designers and developers.

- I would love to see either On2's VP7, or some other codec added to increase quality. VP6 has been great, but lets not rest on our laurels.

[MD] I agree that we should keep pushing for better quality in future releases. I'm not sure if VP7 would give us a significant enough increase to justify the added code in the Player. Do you have any other suggestions? VP6 is actually pretty good and I've seen it beat h.264 implementations before. Remember that it's not just the codec, it's the quality of the encoding - which is an art form. [/MD]

- We are using the Flash platform to distribute interactive video content, and the CPU load that video in the Flash Player takes is killing us. Everyone wants to know why Windows Media Player and Quicktime can play full-screen but our content starts stuttering and is unwatchable.

[MD] I would look for something like this to first appear in Apollo. With regard to people comparing Flash's capabilities in this area to Windows Media or Quicktime, remind them that the Flash Player is 1MB and Windows Media is 13MB, Quicktime is 18MB+ (with iTunes). Sometimes you have to make some trade-offs in order to get pervasiveness. [/MD]

-OpenGL. If you don't think WPF's 3D is going to be a problem for flash, go here : http://www.thewpfblog.com.

[MD] I think 3D, if implemented in a way that makes it approachable to interactive designers, would be a great addition to Flash. Regarding WFP, their 3D support will be limited to the full WPF framework - which means Windows XP and Windows Vista only. WPF/e, according to MSFT, will not have 3D support, and will only have a limited subset of the .NET component framework. That said, we know this is important and we're taking a very serious look at it for the future. [/MD]

Please take another look at your security model - saying it's half-baked is being kind!

But some essential security touches are:
Bring the security settings manager into the right click, same as local storage, camera etc. Having to go to the website is just idiotic (think local content on a computer without net access...)

Whilst doing the above, sort out the website version - you obviously know it's badly done as you have to point out that the settings manager is not an image! If it were half decent, that would be clear without the need to explain it!

Make sure that if the flash security catches and stops something happening - then a warning does appear - at the moment, it *never* appears on IE (just fails silently) and once in a blue moon it appears on Firefox - I've seen developers pulling hair out wondering why something isn't working - so how is a 'normal' user meant to know that to get it working they need to visit your website?? Silently failing because of security sandbox is just pointless - make it obvious what to do!

Please, please do something about the simple task of calling javascript in the page holding the swf... If the html + swf is on a CD (happens so much it's untrue - esp. learning content) - without allowing your hole cd drive (and that's if you have a clue you are meant to - see above!) - you can't do it. That makes absolutely no sense at all - how do you know you are always going to trust a cd?? And what security problem is an swf envoking, say, a javascript popup?? OK you might want to stop people loading something from the web without permission - but stopping a call to the very page that holds the swf??? Why??
There's 8 years of content like this that just broke when you introduced this new model (where's that 'we always make new players backward compatible'??) - please think again and sort it out! I'm not alone here - just do a google on it!

more text features please. better html support in flash.

1. OpenGL Support for graphics acceleration
2. The ability to playback flv with any flash player natively, including being able to save flv's to disc.

- 3d like scenes of movieclips with light effects
- better sound api, create sounds at runtime, filters, soundeffects
- detect if the mouse is outside the player

I highly agree with the ability to use custom codecs. Native 3D Support would be awesome -- though it would probably be a big pain in the butt for you guys =).

Stuff relating to AS3:

- Ability to get SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() on a Microphone source or on any individual sound.
- Add gotoAndStop() and gotoAndPlay() to the AV1MMovie Class -- makes it easier to grab an exported video from After Effects
a more robust method of passive bytearray to a c++ type wrapper.
- BitmapData.fillRect currently only supports 1 color to be filled. Would be nice to have a threshold parameter.
- Abstract classes?

Stuff that could possibly relate to the Apollo release:

- ability to change when the Flash Player starts to use virtual memory. In high memory applications, they can slow down or decide to quit totally when the Flash Player decides it wants to start swapping.
- Add a ExternalInterface.call that does not serialize data so we can send/load ByteArray? Security problems?

Stuff that could be finished?

flash.geom.Point is still slower then creating your own Point class.
There still seems to be a redraw bug when using Movieclip.scrollRect -- it's still redrawing the entire clip.

p2p, Player to Player in the browser. Hook up across the originating server ala Napster, then let the players use the connection without clogging the original app server. Let streaming video from one player - play in any other.

Please fix the security dialog/settings. At 1600x1200 the font size is so small our wealthy clients can't see it much less understand it... Maybe it could offer a yes/no = allow or not with the offending site's address? Can your mother work with the existing joke?

1) FMS vs RED5 opencodec related issue :

Having flash player supporting open codecs, doesnt actually mean that you guys should plug in codec like ogg or other true open audio/video codecs.

What we all mean is providing an API that would allow us to create open codecs, or invent a plugg-able technology to do so.

Open codecs could also mean open that for example i would want to create LZO or UCL compression and use them as the transport container for a custom webservice implementation.

Open codec also means VIDEO or AUDIO.

Actually what we all want is an API of programming these that would be like a module, not like an actionscript program. ( something like remote DLL that will reside on developer server protected by a crossdomain.xml like pollicy, that after beeing loaded, would also run in a sandbox )

This Mike will open the door for creativity not only for designers but in the same way for people that invent new things.

THIS MEANS A TRUE : "FLASH PLATFORM" as you like so much to name it.

It will trully be a launch platform for any kind of developers.

But i think what i mention here maybe too much for curent flash, and the implications are unknown to your business model.

But remember this guys, one day you will do it, exactly as i am writing here, with a plugin architecture.

One day we'll have a platform!

This is what OPEN means, OPEN for us, the developers, the ones that created the magic glow arround your flash player, the most used software in history of mankind.

Mike, is there a way to get additional languages support in FP 10 or that time? Ruby/Python make their way to broad adoption everywhere. And JVM/.NET are both aware. Do you?

[MD] I don't know but it's a good suggestion. The architects of the Flash Player are following this thread closely. If it makes sense and it will further the platform, I'm sure we'll consider it. Thanks. [/MD]

BTW, Mike, could you point me on that licensing fees for H.264 implementations? I just want to compare it with On2 as you suggested.

About community value.. Closing the doors isn't the community value. Flash Platform can become a perfect RIA choice for every developer but M$ slaves. But Adobe needs to embrace OSS developers for this. Otherwise M$ will assign 1000 more developers to WPF2 two years later and get rid of Adobe Flash in people minds. Completely. Flash would be consider just for banner ads. As it used to be 7 years ago.

[MD] I think this is a good way to look at the benefits of a vivacious open source community. The OS community for Flash can allow us to compete more strongly against the multi-billion dollar MSFT R&D machine. This results in a wider variety of solutions for our customers and the whole community. Things get complicated when OS projects compete directly with our commercial solutions. It's not a bad thing, it's just tricky when it comes to our *supporting* various projects. Providing our support costs us money and time and we need to spend that money and time where we think it will make the biggest impact. Some times that will be an investment in open source programs, some times that will be an investment in existing Adobe tools and solutions, and sometimes that will be an investment in new products and solutions.

As a whole, I personally think Open Source is a very good thing. It just aggrevates me (again, this is my personal opinion - don't go flying off the handle on me) when people try to shove open source down my throat without being objective or even listening (as I *try* to do when I speak with open source advocates, like my friend Aral Balkan). Open source for the sake of open source (or technology for the sake of technology, for that matter) doesn't make sense to me. I'm a big supporter of any technology solution, be it open source or commercial, if it provides a unique value, and delivers it to the masses in a unique and efficient way. I just wish people wouldn't be so smug about various technology religions, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, open source, AJAX, etc, etc. It doesn't have to be such a religious, take-all-things-personally war.

Anyways - I'm in a soap-boxy mood so I should probably descend before I speak myself into a corner. ;-) [/MD]

The ability to render a far greater array of HTML within a text input field would be great. The closest thing to a rich text editor in flash (play.grounds Flash Text Editor) doesn't really behave like a traditional word processor and pales in comparison to even the simplest HTML based rich text editor. I'm not sure the job was quite finished when html support was added in flash 5 and 6, and css styles were never properly implemented when they appeared in flash 7. For instance, when applying a stylesheet to an editable text field, the text field becomed read only! This makes life hard when you're using that textfield in a CMS context. I would like the html/css support that was added in flash 5, 6 & 7 to be re-thought and re-implemented so that developers can make use of these features in real world applications. As they stand at the moment, there are just too many hoops to jump through and pitfalls to end up in.

Personally I would like to see an OS native settings dialog instead of the weird webpage thingy being used right now. You can't make changes to the settings when you not online.

Joystick support would also be nice.

1. filters (such as drop shadow) to appear when printed.

2. tab highlight: ability to set the highlight colour of tab selected buttons etc (at the moment its a yellow box). I know it can be done using components but why not let the colour be set for just normal tab selecting. Eeven better would be to have OS standard representations of tab selection eg: dashed line within the button.

quad deformation of sprite/movieclip

Open video codec ( anyone got any suggestions ? )

I understand that on the video side there are problems finding a good open codec and that vp6 actually does good job when it comes to quality for the size of the file. If someone has a suggestion of a good open video codec please speak up.

Open audio codecs ( lots of options )

However audio codecs are another issue. We know MP3 has issues but there are open alternatives. What about ogg? For the low latency voice recording speex would be an excellent choice.

[MD] I've heard metion of "Ogg" a lot around the office. I have not had the chance to review the licensing terms (if there are any) so I can't comment on the feasibility from the business side, but this one looks promising. Nothing's out of the question at this point. [/MD]

More access to raw audio data

Since the flash player has got a lot faster, it would be great if we could get access to read and write the raw audio data. Developers could then develop encoders and decoders for the flash player. This would also open up the possibility of creating editors for audio files.

[MD] I couldn't agree more with this one. I know Tinic Uro was able to squeeze a few small things for capturing audio data during playback in Flash Player 9 but he has really big things in mind for future releases. This area is one of those areas that we decided to hold back on so we could do it once and do it BIG in the future. We nailed video and graphic effects with Flash Player 8, AVM performance in Flash Player 9, so look to more big things in Flash Player 10. In fact, that's why we're looking for ideas right now. The most encouraging thing to me is that most of the things asked for in this thread are the exact same things that we've been talking about doing. :) [/MD]

Since I asked for people to speak up on the open source video codec front I thought I should get the ball rolling and do some research. Its important we look for viable options instead of just pestering Adobe for things they may not be able to deliver. Here is what I have found so far.

Dirac - Open source codec being developed by the BBC. Looks like it has a lot of potential. I have emailed them with some questions about its suitability for web streaming. No patent issues.

Theora. - Developed from VP3 (after on2 open sourced it), targeting low bitrate streaming. Im not sure if the quality is good enough but might be an option. No patent issues.

XVid - Open source but has patent issues in some countries so not really suitable for inclusion in flash player.

Any other options ?

1) Fix all the bugs the player has with bitmapdata & scrollrect (+5 if you also fix the problems with text w/fx).

2) Fix the nasty bug in textfields of image duplication if you change the html (+2 if you also make the htmlText be xhtmlText, +8 if you also don´t add that strange <font size=2 around the image that makes editable text looks microscopic).

3) Add new tags to the (x)htmlText: sup, sub, ul, ol, hr, h1-6.

4) Don´t change the (x)htmlText into a tag-mess by applying a css to the textfield. (+7 if you also don´t change the type property from editable to dynamic)

a solid and constant framerate, in all browser, and between the player and browsers.

... coreAnimation like panther ;) !

For ActiveX player - load movie from memory.
Now available only from file.

mySound = new Sound(data:ByteArray);
mySound.setBasePitch(440);
mySound.playInKey("c3");
mySound.pitchbend(duration:Number, start:"c3", end:"c4");

...or something like that... :P

"Everyone wants to know why Windows Media Player and Quicktime can play full-screen but our content starts stuttering and is unwatchable."

Find out how these guys do it.
http://mediacenter.onlinelib.de/

Free distortion of clips or bitmaps via code.

Fix loading of resources like shared libraries and fonts. Once a library resource or font has been loaded, it should be available to anything inside the movie.

The option for slower users to turn off effects in the flash plaer on the fly (drop shadows, blurs, etc.)with out a lot of extra code on the creators part.

Also skinning the Flash context menu is a fantastic idea.

Not exactly a feature, and the rest of the Flash community will probably want to kill me, but I suggest letting the Flash Player rest for a while. You introduced so many new features with Player 9 that most of us probably don't know what to do with them all. That's an awesome thing, but it will take some time before all of the new functionality is fully understood and all current issues come to light. Additionally, the install base needs some time to stabilize. How will developers know which version of the player to develop for if the market penetration gets fragmented to 25% Player 8, 35% Player 9, 35% Player 10, and 5% Other/None? While I loved the accelerated timeline between 8 and 9 for selfish reasons, I think the last thing I need as a professional in the next year is a new player version.

With that out of the way, I have long felt that the Player needs something similar to Shockwave's Xtras. I don't necessarily think there needs to be 3rd party Xtras, but I think the Player should have a stable core that changes very infrequently with its peripheral functionality updated through pluggable libraries. Plugins within a plugin, yes, but these would be so small that they could be installed without prompting the user, and allow more rapid correction of individual bugs.

I would also second the comments regarding improvements needed to the security model, particulary the fact that the settings manager is hosted at Adobe instead of being part of the player.

Codecs have been mentioned and I want to reiterate that. We know that CPU usage is a problem with VP6 but maybe there's a middle way to bring higher quality live video to the Player somehow. Right now VP6 is only available for decoding, not encoding.

Nellymoser: it's all been said. This format puts boulders in the way of cool podcasting apps. We need a free or very cheap way of transcoding Nellymoser to something useful like mp3. Or give developers a choice of codecs when recording audio via Flash Media Server. Nellymoser may be a great voice codec but - and I reiterate Mike here - sometimes you have to to make some trade-offs in order to get pervasiveness (this time I mean a pervasive use of Flash Media Server and cool apps built on top of it).

Last but not least: we want screensharing capabilities for use with Flash Media Server. It's not fair that Adobe is competing with its Flash Media Server developers and keeping an unfair advantage. You sell us the tools but keep the best ones for yourself. That stinks.
Someone said (in the Macromedia days) that it's as if Adobe was setting up design agencies as well as selling them Photoshop - that's how I feel. Screensharing please, it was planned once before, let's have it now!

thanks for listening

Stefan

We need to see a open source audio/voice codec in the Flashplayer, that makes it possible to extract and convert the audio layer of the FLV files that are encoded by the Flashplayer (through webcam/microphone). Right now it's nearly impossible to do this because the Nellymoser codec is the only choice we have. Giving us the ability to extract the audio of our FLV files will be a good move for Flash Media Server (and Red5) because it's a feature we otherwise have to look for in competing products like Windows Media Server. I have thr feeling that Adobe won't do this because of the licensing agreement they made with Nellymoser, that prevents them from implementing a different or extra audio codec in the Flashplayer..

Though I appreciate the open dialog, I don't see the point in soliciting feedback and then Mike D. cutting down that feedback line by line. Do you want feedback or not? I'd recommend gathering all the feedback, then creating your own post with your reasoning on why not to do certain things.

[MD] It's called dialog, my friend. I take the time to respond and provide my viewpoints. You're welcome to argue with me. Or you could complain and push for one-way communication. One thing I've learned to always be true in online discourse is that there's always someone who will complain. You can never please everyone.

Someone on this thread actually complained that instead of asking for feature ideas we should be finishing the Linux version of the Flash Player - as if we could only focus on one thing at a time. Could we dedicate more resources to the Linux port? Sure. But nine women can't make a baby in one month. Throwing resources at a problem rarely contributes to finding and implementing the solution.[/MD]

Better support HTML in textfields would be awesome... oh.. and for flash to output valid html code.. that way you could make a nice wysiwyg editor for blogs etc.

Search engine friendly files... Even if you don't make any changes to the flash player and chatted with google or msn or whoever to help them out indexing flash sites.

Hardware acceleration! Even with the 10x faster AVM2, complicated interfaces still feel sluggish (look at JamJar e.g.) While every system these days has a GPU in it, it feels a damn shame not to use it...If you guys can manage that, Sparkle/WPFe can say byebye...

About open (and patent-free) codecs for video: there is now an implementation in C for dirac in development and maybe could be used for the next flashplayer: http://schrodinger.sourceforge.net/.

The are using liboil for assembler optimizations

better mousecursor handling, maybe similar to director, assign cursor to movieclip

A lot of people around me hate flash websites with sound (either buttons sound or ambient music, for example).
It would be great that we could set by default the sound to 0 in the setting panel for all websites !

Slightly mundane request, but one which would save me a lot of work. As evil as the need for _lockroot may be, I would appreciate similar _lockglobal and _lockbase properties.

More and more, we're developing large, modular sites which have many levels of movies loading movies loading movies. A lot of these sub content pieces are built by third parties, or are re-used existing content.

When content doesn't work and I'm trying to implement a quick fix, _lockroot only goes some of the way. I still have the following issues:

Classes clashing - if child content MC defines a class not properly packaged and named, and this happens to clash with an existing class, the sub content will no longer behave correctly. This causes me a world of pain in checking 3rd party work is properly name spaced. Maybe a _lockglobal, or _lockclasses could be used to ensure an MC will always refer to itself to find a Class definition, rather than that of the existing parent content.

Relative paths - when a child mc is loaded into a parent mc, the child mc's base url is set to that of the parent. For example, if the child mc tries to load sub content itself, using a relative path, this path will now become relative to the parent mc. This, again, can cause a world of pain in getting 3rd party content to work. Maybe a _lockbase property could be used to instruct loaded content to always load relative to the Mc's origin.

Unless there's a smarter way of doing this? Or even an existing way? If so, do tell.

Thanks

Security

Make the security options a system-level window, not some crazy custom web page. I have clients and Directors that simply don't understand what it is and will not accept that any user would ever use it. It's wrong for the following reasons:

Doesn't look like a standard system-level dialogue that users would be familiar with.

Requires internet connection - which we don't always have.

Requires visiting Macromedia site in order to inspect data on my machine - any privacy issues here?

Uses Flash in a web page to set security settings for Flash - in this day and age of Phishing, security and privacy, this just seems plain wrong.

Fails it's own security model, as I'm presuming I can't block macromedia.com domain.

Would also be cool if you could rethink, or find a better solution, to the security restriction of locally run Flash not being able to call JS functions in html or load from network, without having to do some trickery with security settings. As described above - trying to explain to a client or director, who's previewing a locally running demo of your site, how to set the security settings to allow the site to work just doesn't wash. Due to this restriction, there are some directors here who actually think that the Flash 8 player "stops sites from working" and as a result have asked to have it removed from their machines. Way to go.

Instead, could a security-restricted operation not kick up a warning box: "This piece of Flash is trying to call some local JavaScript. This could be potentially dangerous... blaa blaa" but let the user select "this time only", "allow for this session", "always allow this Flash to do this". And that adjusts the user's security options - without going to the Macromedia website?

NB. everywhere I say Macromedia, I mean Adobe... sorry force of habit.

Hi Mike,

I just wanted to address this comment you made:

[MD] I suggest learning more about "open" codecs. There are still licensing fees involved, and in the case of h.264, they are quite substantial on a per-client basis. Consider that the Flash Player is the most distributed piece of software on the planet with over 600 million users. There's a lot more to the codec topic than most people realize.

On that note, licensing aside, tell us why specific codecs like h.264 are important to you. How will this help your business or allow you to develop better experiences for your users? We take the subject of adding technologies to the Flash Player very, very seriously so arguments like, "because it will make it easier for us to build Red5 and stop buying Flash Media Server from Adobe" won't resonate very well with us. We need to be focusing on providing value to our customers and the community. [/MD]

I think that the issue is not that we want to make building Red5 easier. We actually aren't having mush trouble on that front. Red5 can and is being built without the need to encode or decode the video or audio. The issue or concern has more to do with the fact that no one can do encoding and decoding on the server-side, whether it be with FMS or Red5. You just can't do it period without shelling out money for the On2 or NellyMoser software. This is what people are concerned with.

Now for some examples of things that could be created with a more open codec. How about being able to upload a video in any format (WMV, MOV, MPG4, etc...) and then be able to stream that to an audience using the Flash Player? How about screen capturing programs? How about generating video based on some type of data, perhaps creating video output of data coming from the Hubble telescope for example. There seem to be so many possibilites for Flash if this one piece were opened up. How about an online multitrack studio that can export to multiple audio formats that in turn could be loaded into something like Reason, MOTU's Digital Performer, or any other music program.

I agree that the license for the existing choices out there aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't explore alternatives to how you are doing it now. Maybe Adobe should publish its own open format.

Anyway, it's not at all our intent in building Red5 to detract from what you guys at Adobe are doing. In fact I think what we are creating is nothing but good for the Flash platform. Plus, I think that an open codec for audio and video will only increase the possibilites of what can be created with and for Flash.

Adoption of quicktime plug in! embeded in the flash player!

The Best Feature would be an implementation of some kind of audio encoder, that would be able to recive audio and encode it in the format. FMS is great but letting Flash do that on its own will be a great thing

1. Opentype font support.
2. Sound spectrum API able to work on microphone input.
3. Variable speed playback of sound and video (1.5x, 2.0x, 3.0x, etc)
4. 3D support.
5. GPS device API similar to camera and microphone.
6. Built-in Actionscript code encryption or obfusication.
7. Tablet PC support (textfield inputs, etc)
8. Support a greater subset of HTML rendering.
9. Faster!

Thanks for the great work!

Two biggies:

Contextual menu to control volume control or just to mute a particular SWF.

Contextual menu for buttons with external links to open in a new window or new tab.

3D

Play FLV files with the Standalone player without having to resort to using another SWF to load it, or use one of the many 3rd party apps.

There is no reason that the Flash player shouldn't be able to play FLV files directly.

Advance context menu - submenus! Or build in "MouseEvent.RIGHT_MOUSE_CLICK" for example and let up to developer handle this event.

3D engine - for example something like Director has

Thanks

Programmable accces to the context Menu.

Open the possibility for users to extract/download assets (pictures, sound, video?) via the context menu.

we want Arabic rtl encoding just like Microsoft programs
or create a Midlle east version like photoshop ME
.. and more Skins to UI component or make an easy way to edit them ..
also more HMTL futres

and thanks.

3D or the end of flash!
(At least enable quad) plz

better html rendering, especially inline images..

Some things I'm hankering for afer playing with .NET/WPF....

- TextField.verticalAlign

- Localisation built into player e.g...

TextField.localeString = "id";

(then when you change Locale.setCurrentLocale() it automatically updates all textfields which have a localeString id set.)

- Generall fix the existing TextField issues, text metrics, display of images and HTML, superscript, subscript.

- setPixels() / Faster method of drawing to an offscreen buffer

- Better settings dialog. Taking them to the Adobe site and having them use a Flash movie that actually forces page refreshes is pretty bad! Someone mentioned above, something like an "allow" button similar to how the videocamera behaves would be perfect.

- Ability to analyse audio data, even a computeSpectrum would enable some sort of voice recognition (at least recognition of a couple of key words), I understand anything more might impact on Breeze/FMS when combined with flash.net.Socket.

- Removal of "wait a frame"/doLater(). Not much hope for this one. I know its the way initialization occurs, but it's still something that is frustrating, can make your code more verbose than need be, and trips up any newcomers time after time.

- Allow routed events/commands to pass through to browser. I'm sure I read someone mention it. Ctrl+t, ctrl+click etc.

- Ability to specify the .url property of a movieclip/textfield/portion of textfield and have that link appear in the browser status bar on rollover.

- Quads, some very basic 3d poly surface in the player for the Sandy project to use :)

- Keep up the great work!

-Create sounds at runtime
-Althought there are some tools out there to protect the code inside the swf, it would be great it can be protected from the player in order to avoid code stealing

arguments.caller

ability to use the arguments keyword in a constructor.

abstract classes!

Right to left.
ימין לשמאל

1. Hardware acceleration if possible.

2. 3D API for DirectX and OpenGl.

Here's my list
1. A GPS API - this would be for both Flash Player and Flash Lite Player. Should have permission control, of course!
2. Support for double-click, hover, and "cliak and a half" (like on the Mac) mouse events.
3. Tighter integration with browser (esp with tabbing and focus) when using non-default wmode. Hell, any integration would be good here!
4. Improved accessibility - wmode fixes, ability to force screen reader to reread Flash when new links appear, etc.
5. Maybe a voice API?

A runtime look up table for labels.

MovieClip._labels

{2:"Loader", 6:"Intro", 34:"Main"}

..or some such. Not sure how to deal with same name labels, but basically i want an interface to get a list of labels in a mc by name and _frame

Look at Directors MarkerList for ideas.

--

One other, please give option to turn off contextual menu in non-plugin playback environments. The number of times i have to embed a swf in a 3rd party wrapper just to do this simple thing is much too regular. Usually at a loss of frame rate just to appease clients who don't want this.

Give us access to the onRighMouseDown & Up events.
If the focus is shifting to application dev as it seems then please re-consider giving us this basic UI control. (Even Macs have right mouse buttons now!)

Hi,

Shared fonts. Right now sharing fonts (loading fonts at runtime) is a HELL. There's no official way to do so, just some more or less valid/scary approaches:

- http://www.v-i-a.net/blog/archives/000043.html (http://tinyurl.com/np766, babelfish translation)

- http://www.zarate.tv/articulos/shared_fonts/index.php
( http://tinyurl.com/fufs4 , babelfish translation)

- http://sharedfonts.com/

Please fix this. Just a clean, documented, simple way of doing this. Nothing, nothing has been done on this since player.... 5? It's going to be a huge help for absolutely everybody.

Then, please fix current bugs before adding more stuff to the player. I rather prefer something working fine to something bigger working... let's say not as it should.

And last, but no least. Release the Linux player at the same time than the Windows/Mac one.

Thanks for hearing people : )

Cheers!

- Better sound API
- Sound synthesis, pitching, filtering, etc...
- ComputeSpectrum on Microphone

Hi,

Flash is really powerful, very useful and each generation gets better. I have two features that would put it over the top for me.

1. The ability to send/provide RGBA8888 bitmap/surface data from an external source/app (for instance one that is hosting the control); that way the external source would have a way to provide it's own rendered content that would be able to be composited with flash content in a natural way.

2. An easy/direct way to get at the final composite buffer of as a RGBA8888 surface from a hosting application.

Please keep up the great work.

Cheers,
-BPT

A huge thing for us would be the ability to implement a crossdomain policy file onto a Flash Media Server so that we can have access to BitmapData.draw(). Why is this restriction here in the first place and why does it work differently than other crossdomain (or in this case- same domain!) policies? We are huge FMS users but having these features crippled really hinders some of our projects. Thank you!

Others have said it, but we all need to shout...

More control over sound: like you gave us bitmaps and 2D filters, give us read/write access to the raw sound buffer, give us simple sound filters, maybe allow us to easily plug filters in. How about basic wavetable synthesis or subtractive, sythesis etc. Maybe integrate the Midi control plugin that someone wrote to allow us to use our Midi keyboards & guitars, etc. to do crazy things.

If you need a DSP guru, one of my good buddies writes DSP code for all sorts of sound applications and hardware including AMS Neve, Akai and other culprits.

Sorry, I forgot to specially ask you to fix the wmode hell:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wmode+problems&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

This is NOT working properly in 80% of the cases, not even in IE + Windows.

Please make it work or remove it. Don't give the idea that something is working when it is not.

As I've said before, please fix current bugs before adding more stuff to the player.

Cheers,

Hi ..

- decrease flash player's size (now it's 1 mega and it is too much for download).

1) Superscript and Subscript in dynamic text

2) Direct access to browser back/forward history

3) Better integrated security settings, directly in right-click menu Settings, rather than the incredibly awkward and confusing launching of Adobe.com website to change local settings. Also, in the event there's an security problem, a seamless "Allow and continue" that doesn't require restarting the site.

Please make a better Linux flash player. It is a real pain in the neck that there is no proper flash support. We are people too, show that you care.

well, i've not read all the comments above, just skimed through....

currently i wanna highlite a very important issue with FP.

The Date object in FP is not updated since Flash5, and it have very limited features. it wasn't upgraded when AS2 was introduced in Flash7. currently Flash is being used heavily for data driven apps, and Date is very important part of data, especially for graphing & comparing.

the current version of FP8/9 don't have Date function other moderen programing langs offers.
some of them are:
- string formatting [d.toString("dd-MMM-yy")]
- time frame [time_left = d2 - d1 // should return time in days/years/months etc or there should be static functions for converting timeframe into days/years/etc]
- other important Date/Time related functions

Bug Report:
===========
Content-Type property of XML/LoadVars object is not populated with server's Content-Type data.

when making request i can change this property to whatever i want, but wneh the object gets response from server, it does not populate server's sent Content-Type propety in response XML/LoadVars object, but always defaults to url-encoded/blablabla...

// chall3ng3r //

As far as I could research the file browse function has no way to trace back the directory path from the selected file. What good is opening a dir dialog box to choose a file and then not be able to do anything with it. I did set a default path to a specific folder and then browse to that folder to select files but that greatly limits the functionality of my application. Please allow for extraction of path information from a selected file using the browse function.

Please.. do something to make the search in actionscript work better.. e.g. try searching for "depthmanager" and try and find what you want in that massive unordered list.

action script coverter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111
say i put "when i press"it converts it to on.press or "go to frame 3 and play"coverts to gotoAndPlay(3)

How about "method_missing" feature from Ruby? It's the hell much of a bulk code to create anything similar to dynamic methods in AS3 with it's Proxy class.

We should learn from Ruby and Rails as well.

It would be nice if we could detect all WindowsVersions inside Flash.

Vista, Windows XP 64bit, Windows 2003, Windows 2003 R2, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME
Windows 2000 Server,..... and all the rest down to Windows 95.

And of course a Flashplayer that supports all this Versions ;-)

I want the yield keyword in JavaScript 1.7 and Python.

It will make it easier for us to build interactive contents.

PEP 342 says:

"Coroutines are a natural way of expressing many algorithms, such as simulations, games, asynchronous I/O, and other forms of event-driven programming or co-operative multitasking."

References:

PEP 342 -- Coroutines via Enhanced Generators
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0342/

New in JavaScript 1.7
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.7

thanks for listening

FileReference uploads: make Flash aware when a filename is changed on upload.

What I'm reading that I don't think is important:
- size of the FP download
- ability to program to FP API with different programming languages

What I'm most excited about:
- AVM2 + JIT. this is a quantum leap!
- the cleanup of the API. I want to give the Adobe team a hug for this.
- working debugger. hooray!

What I'd like to see that's been mentioned a lot:
- option to sacrifice pixel perfect rendering and leverage GPU
- make font RSLs dead simple
- better CSS support in flash text
- i know it's not entirely in adobe's hands, but comparable performance across browser plugins
- 3d API

What I'd like to see that I haven't seen mentioned much:
- AS3 keyword to hint code blocks for compilation to native instructions
- profiling tools
- native *three* dimensional perlin functions
- bezier functions / drawing API
- events for mouse entering/exiting the plugin area

Let me have more control on the ActiveX flash player when using it outside the browser. Do the same without another wrapper SWF.

State persistent:
Dump the flash player memory and status to file/socket. Then the flash player can be unload(i.e. close your browser). And I can quickly restore it from a new instance in a second(i.e. back in history).

And finally,
a offical Java player(whatever using JNI or pure-java).

Hi

Unicode for Indic (Hindi) Country : India , It renders text as box IT show charaters in edit mode but when we loose focus it show boxes ." पंकज ताम्रकार or सारे जहाँ से अच्छा हिंदोस्ताँ हमारा । " this text is not rendered correctly in Edit mode.

Thanks
On behalf of All India Translation Team

* The new text rendering engine in v8 is great and the strange line breaking bugs are finally fixed! Thank you. Now let's have some breathing time for adoption of the v8 player and time for us to learn AS3...

* TextField.VerticalAlign (top, middle, bottom) - I could use this in many cases

* Mousewheel support on Mac.

* Wish we didn't have to use javascript to embed flash.. but not sure if Adobe can do anything about this. (damn you eolas!!!!)

* Improve performance in browser (the standalone player is noticably faster)

* Associate Flash player with .flv files so they can be played without a .swf

* If possible, an API for integration with browser back/forward buttons and bookmarking

* The player is actually pretty solid.. the IDE in my opinion has more room for improvement - see my comments in the other post.

Any chance of having a trace box on the player - ie. a dev-defined visible text box that'll post much the same stuff as the output box in the authoring environment.

There are some instances when you can only test in a browser (for example when is has to be residing on the 'release url'). The only way I ever got around this was to make a temporary text box, and define my own 'traceB' function.

This is a pain in the ass tbh, and seems like a simple solution.

An option to save the currently visible Flash state as an image?

There should be a mechanism by which we can save the swf file as an image. This would be a nice feature to have in flash applications.

Thanks,
Akhil Dhanuka

Only really a couple of things:

1) Inline images in the textfield box that can be rendered anywhere. Best example would be emoticons.

2) Make it much harder for people to de-compile a .swf

This one is a simple feature, don't know if anyone has though about this one. Can I save my Undo(s) in the saved file. For Example, I had deleted an image from a specific frame and saved the document and closed. If I open it later on can I press the Undo so that that image placed back there again??

NetStream.loadBytes();

The company I work for often produce larger flash solutions that dynamically loads all the texts used. This works well (most of the times). The problem is that when you have 30 different languages including chinese, arabic, polish and so on you come to a point where embedding all fonts needed creates huge files that are practically impossible to use online. Today we simply solve this by not embedding the fonts for certain languages, but this makes it more or less impossible to do different kinds of text animations and leads to either alot longer production times or lower quality productions. I don't know how to solve this (and if it was easy in any way it would already have been solved), but if there was a way to dynamically load any type of characters and then be able to fade, zoom, twist or whatever the text as if the text was embedded (but without including some 40.000 characters for each font and size) it would save us tons of time and money.

If the above sound confusing, the basic point is that further improvement in the ways Flash can animate dynamic texts that are not embedded or some kind of magic "embed all" that doesn't make the files huge and that works with more or less any character set would make my life so much easier ;)

I have to put a sound on/off button in the Html page I have made the button in Flash but the problem is this that the sound get start again if he visit some other page in the site even if the user has off the sound on previous page

On the open codec front, Mike asked why it is important. Someone else said "open codecs" means the ability to develop and plugin a custom codec. I personally don't think most developers want this ability, but it would be very nice.

What IS important is the ability to use codec that is open source compatible, as it opens the door for many new and unique applications using Flash. The reason for an open source compatible codec is not to allow red5 to impelement something that could complete with FMS (although, yes it could). It's important because it would allow flash to be used in ways that are not possible with FMS.

For example, I want to implement a number of different applications that utilize voice over IP in Flash. Because of the capabilities of Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/) I want to use that as my VOIP server. I selected Asterisk because it provides more capabilities than any of the other VOIP server's out there. It is the only VOIP server that is flexible enough to integrate with my application and do everything I need. But I can't use Asterisk with Flash because they don't have a common codec.

Asterisk, being an open source project that wants to remain completely legit, doesn't implement an MP3 codec or any proprietary closed source codec. I don't want to go through all the work of implementing a nellymoser or On2 codec plugin for asterisk because it is not my area of expertise. However, asterisk already supports speex (see codecs section of http://www.asterisk.org/features) and I am sure it will eventually support the various Ogg codecs as well.

So if Flash supported some open codecs like Speex, and Ogg (with Vorbis/Theora/Speex) then I could use it with Asterisk and build my applications! If Flash directly supported SIP and some of the unencumbered VOIP codecs directly, all the better!

Then people would be able to build all sorts of different VOIP applications on top of Flash. Imagine Vonage, Comcast (large cable provider), Verizon, and all the other companies playing in the VOIP and telephony space making available VOIP clients from their websites using Flash. Imagine the kinds of public web applications that could be built or the corporate applications that could be built with this kind of capability - Video conferencing with land-line tie in, etc. This is all good for Flash and would make it even more important and ubiquitous than it already is.

That is why it is important for Flash to embed at least one, and preferably a couple of open source compatible codecs.

Just my opinion though.

Here's some good resources on truely open codecs that are not license/patent encumbered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

Ogg, Speex, Vorbis and Theora are all inter-related and all available on Windows and UN*X platforms (linux and even OS X I believe). Their inter-relation ought to make incorporating all of them into Flash simpler than incorporating a lot of un-related codecs. Since those codecs are already available on multiple platforms it should make supporting those codecs on multiple platforms in Flash fairly simple.

Rob

I would like to see an "stage guide" toggle button that would provide a way to turn a top level stage outline on/off. Something similar to the ruler guidelines that would put a green box around visible stage area.

When working with tons of layers and big, scrolling backgrounds, I often lose track of how big my movie dimensions are. I usually put a box in a guide layer, but it would be handy to have that toggle button.

1. Add forced volume control and or mute to the context menu

2. Add Save as source… for videos to the context menu like in QuickTime.

VideoDownloader https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/ is currently the most popular Firefox extension. This should proof that people want download videos and Adobe should make video downloading easier and also encourage content providers to do the same.

3. Official standalone Flash Video Player would be cool.

I'd like to echo earlier posts about audio. With V8 player we were given much lower level access to the screen. It would be great if the same were done for audio. Being able to play at different pitches, access to the binary data etc. Would be cool if there was a rock solid way to keep sounds synched too. soundOnComplete is next to useless.

Also, please do keep working on the player speed. It's still much slower on Macs.

I haven't seen any bright red text regarding people asking for a linux version over and over again yet.

LINUX VERSION PLEASE!

1,add "refresh" menu item to reload swf file.
2,add "property" menu item to show movie size,fps,metaInfo,etc...

Pure right-click event. This event wou;d have to detect actual right-clicks... not just context-menu events like what is currently in place. This is quite important for using the flash player in environments like VB, c#, delphi, etc. Sub-classing the right-click and passing the event can be problematic in many cases..... especialy when hunting what DisplayObject was clicked.

Hi,

Please fix the font embedding to include unicode data. Pretty please! You know, there are other languages besides English, and there are more character encodings than latin.

Thank you very much.

- loading Fonts during runtime
- duplicating content of loaded swf's at runtime (did not find a way to do this)
- API to modify and access loaded graphic at shape-level (text,lines areas etc.)

I would like to see the Flash Player become better for gaming; to that end, I would like to see it gain three things in particular:

1. Double-Buffering - I am not sure how feasible this is in windowed mode, but it would be nice to have even it only in full-screen mode. It could even be optional at either the user-level or the developer-level (or both) if you do not want to require the slight performance hit that page-switching might bring.

2. Hardware Acceleration - Not just for 3D, although that would certainly be nice; Flash Player tends to render simple two-dimensional animations much more slowly than other software running the same computer can render fully-textured complex 3D scenes. In a shooting gallery game, for example, Flash Player is unable to maintain a smooth frame rate (e.g., 30fps) after instantiating several targets that run simple two-dimensional trigonometric calculations to determine directions of movement. Of course, some optimizations are possible--such as caching delta values and running the trigonometric calculations only when a new directional determination absolutely needs to be made--but it would be nice to see more speed improvements in the player as well and better utilizing video hardware would be a great start.

3. Greater Peripheral Support - Specifically, joysticks. Keyboards work well enough for most arcade-style games, but a joystick can provide a much better experience, especially when running a game in full-screen mode.

Lest I forget that non-game software development tends to pay my bills more often than game software, I would also like to see more robust download handling, including built-in support for multiple downloads without the current per-file out-of-application save-location prompting by the Flash Player, at least while running in executable mode (obviously, it would be a significant security threat to allow unprompted downloads in plug-in mode). This functionality is available for Flash-based applications via third-party tools such as Zinc, but I would like to see it integrated into the core of Flash Player.

In the threshold function today is not possible select the single color with the gradient of this. For example, if i want change in a photo all blue and the simil blue interval color is impossible.
This is very important for change a dynamic color in the photo. THZ

Web service proxy generation tool. Such a tool is really found in th both Java and .Net development environments, allowing you to create a proxy object by pointing at a WSDL. I spent 30 mins looking for this in Flex Builder the other day, couldn't find it so I presume its not there.

I know you've heard this a million times, but here's 3 more: PowerPC support for the Linux version, PowerPC support for the Linux version, PowerPC support for the Linux version

Better textField capabilities: support for all html tags - especially superscript and subscript, as well as support for hex symbols.
Also - alignment for loadMovie()

Stream Embedded Video playback in Standalone Player: Currently when loading an external swf with embedded video into a movie with the standalone player, It requires the full size of the swf to load into memory and freezes up the Player until that swf has finished loading. Whereas, the same swf viewed in a browser works perfectly and streams the loading swf.

This has been a major issue for developing standalone Video Presentations for distrubtion on CD and DVD for me. And it has also been a bug since v6 of the player. Please fix this issue in the standalone player.

1. Linux, Win, Mac are all released at the same time. Its pretty easy to do is you developed with each in mind instead of porting to Mac and Linux after
2. 64bit plugins(Linux amd64 player would be great, Ive been running Linux 64bit Firefox for years)
3. Open source the flash player, you make money on the authoring tools, not the player. It will help you fix bugs and port to many more platforms.

Contextual menu to control audio levels. For example, UP/DOWN/MUTE.

I know it's been said before - but the option to turn off sound in the player would be fantastic.

Like many others have stated, Ogg vorbis and speex streaming support would be excellent.

Fix NetStream and/or Video objects so that one NetStream can be simultaneously displayed on two different Videos without incurring the bandwidth overhead of opening up a second NetStream from the same source. Currently if you try to do this, the playback gets corrupted (usually the first Video will go blank), when the NetStream is attached to the second one. (I have need of the ability to display video published to FMS from a camera at two different sizes at one time).

Get rid of that TERRIBLE Global Security Settings Manger.

Its giving Flash a bad name. Users don't "get" it.
Clients hate it even more than developers.
How can you guys expect this to work in the real world.

People don't read the pop-up. 99 times out of
a 100 they just hit "OK". Thinking its, you
know, "OK". Which breaks everything.

The people that do read it still don't get it.
They'd rather just quit the thing and go
about their business.

Sorry to insult but it really is the worst
design ever. I can't believe it was put in
let alone STILL existing into version 9.
Requiring an internet connection? Pure genius.

Fix all Flash/PowerPoint issues:

- Machines with Flash Player v9 installed screw all presentations with an embedded SWF on opening the presentation in PowerPoint, whether you save the presentation or not.

- Solve the 'rewind' animation problem automatically

- Stop the initial flicker you get when viewing a PPT with an embedded SWF

- Make it much simpler to insert an animation into PowerPoint in the first place.

Please...!

I frequently create or work on layouts that have movie clips on the stage where the first frame is empty because it fades in or for some other reason and when you are outside the clip it is invisibl, and hard to select.

It would be nice if you could have a guild type layer that could be seen from outside the clip as well as inside, or perhaps being able to set a frame to be the thumb frame that could be seen in the authoring environment.

Please, fix the bug with windowless mode not processing key state in many cases (Key.isDown does not work).

And nice context menus...

Just merge Director into Flash! Director loses its right to exist with every new feature that comes into Flash.

So the wishlist would be:

- A fully fledged 3D-Api with hardware support (why not at least take Intel's OpenGL/DirectX7 compliant engine which is built into Director?). Flash 3D experiments are ridiculous in terms of 3D-performance compared to the power of modern graphics accelerators, which are nowadays common on all platforms (!).

- Low-level access to a MovieClip's vector data (set & get vertices/curves). It's possible in Director for a long time..

- Full support for binary data (esp. on LoadVars etc.)

- Get the neverending Actionscript textfield issues fixed!!! Their handling is quite unintuitive and it still (it's version 9 ahead!!) requires a lot of workarounds in order to make them work (custom fonts etc)

- Please write a thought-out and nicely structured Flash help! There are some pages with incorrect information. The lack of a good documentation directly yields a loss of product image! Sorry, but the search function sucks big time, it's actually pretty useless..

- Allow multiple selections in the library so that common properties can be set at once for multiple items.

- Install _one_ code view window. It's really bothering when editing .as class scripts inside the Flash IDE and then switching to frame scripts (which then appear in the 'actions' window).

Thanks in advance for considering these improvements.

How about peer-to-peer audio/video between two Flash Players (say with some FMS support so it won't affect your FMS sales but will vastly lower traffic on some webchats)?

PocketPC player - Please please please!!! The links to v. 6 do not work on the website - I have tried v 7 on my PocketPC 2002 and to no avail :( Is there a link to an old working version available?

I hope support will continue - I am working with two other new PocketPC users (ok... Win Mobile) it's on their phones -

Hey... Seling point ... this will be a HUGE market in the days ahead to distribute content with

thanks for reading and hopefully answering @ vailrw@yahoo.com

\R

Allow Microphone.record to memory and playback (without FCS or any server technology). Very useful for building learning apps in where the user hears a soundclip, then records/plays to compare.

Also, devise a method to know if mouse is INSIDE player window, or loses focus. Right now all methods have certain problems.

I'm not sure if these will apply to flash, but based on working with flex, I'd like to see two things:

1) Externalize style sheets. I shouldn't have to recompile my fla to restyle it. This defeats the whole point of stylesheets: i.e. one swf, but multiple stylesheets; and production people can modify style sheets without messing with the fla.

2) Allow multiple space-delimited values for classname, as with the class attribute in html. There is a lot of style power that comes with this ability.

Some requests / comments, though firstly, thanks for listening and feedback on these comments.

Some of these have been said before:

* Mouse input control: right and middle click capture.

A large usability issue is the fact that all clicks that open a new HTML page open as the same window. This breaks the browsers normal flow for links, and makes one scared as to what will happen when clicking something in Flash. I realise there is no good way around this, but the ability to for example, have an 'onMiddleMouseDown' and use getURL with a target of say "_tab", would send an "open in new tab" request to the browser. I realise this would have to be browser tailored which would be a lot of work.

* 3D / Quad Box

I realise 3D is not what Flash is for, that is what Director is, and keeps being for, and I respect that. What I do really want, and what I was sad to find was not included in the transforms in Flash 8 was the ability to skew using Quad Points (yeah, like Director). This led to many slow and cumbersome workarounds for any kind of pseudo 3D. Even the Super Nintendo had specific hardware support for "Mode 7", which though is possible in Flash is very slow.

On the same note, I am in total agreeance that a way to tell Flash to go into a GPU accelerated mode (with loss of accuracy) would be a major boon. (More on that in my Fullscreen rant below).

* Sound

Apart from what people have mentioned above, what I think would be a first step in sound manipulation (effects) would be to support a 'convolver' on a SoundBuffer using another SoundBugger as 'impulse'. This would be a very small thing to implement, but would give you many effects and such that could be simulated, even if they were CPU intensive.

* Fullscreen (video) - Flash 9 tested

The fullscreen implementation in Flash 9 is wonderful and from the tests and examples I've seen so far it looks to be a wonderful boon. It would be great to be able to

* Volume on context

As already mentioned this is sorely needed from a users perspective. This would be even better implemented on a browser scale though (have a button per page/tab to turn down/off all Flash audio on that specific page/tab or globally), which is not up to you guys I think.

* Sound pitch bender

This is a small thing I miss from Director (I think it may have been an undocumented feature even there). Seems like a simple thing to implement, though as you said you want to do Sound all at once, and get it right, so I'm sure you've already looked at this one.

* Sound - 3D

This is not a particularly important thing to have, but would be a nice addition and be a good reason not to have to use Director for a lot of things. This is probably more useful to those doing installation art etc where there is no reason not to use Director anyway (size / market penetration doesn't matter).

* Joystick support

More a reply to what others have said. If not full joystick support, then joystick to keyboard mapping would be an interested thing to use. I've only ever once needed this and it was for a specific installation of a Flash game for promotional uses in a department store, and could then just use a free program called AutoHotKey to do just that. Joysticks are nice, but really not that many people use them, unless it is on a console and that's a totally different argument.

* Ogg Vorbis

It's good to see you looking into this as a format to use. The main advantage would be the very slight (agueable) bitrate vs quality thing, as well as users not having to 'pay' for an encoder if they want to put MP3s in before compiling.

when you zoom into the thing your viewing, you should NOT make the mouse move the screen, because some apps. you draw things and, thats not helpful when it scrools when your trying to draw.

Don't you understand what we need ?
First basics features for Flash Player and Shockwave Player!!! Features you did forgot since 9 versions:
1) Ability to turn off/on sounds by right-clicking even author haven't think to add a button for!
2) Ability to turn off/on sounds globally! Never mind about what will advertisers think! Have respect to customer even ads will not.
3) Ability to force maxima quality level globally. We do want save system ressource for others tasks. We do want to save battery in our laptops (computering full window flashes making my batteries going down more quikly!). Low performance compluters and old computers become slow (even with more than 256MB RAM) and player does not downgrade quality as we want.

WE use Flash Player because you need that way, so WE want manage our ressources WE give to him.

Thanks you will consider my request. I am not alone.

Regards

Even smoother integration of entertainment material to get branding better across on websites.
I do hope that the Flash player will get another tweaking on mobile devices.

Fix the bug in OS X flash player; the flash movie flickers through DHTML menus (even on adobe.com) when in Safari.

I'd *really* like things to behave the same on popup (getURL(javascript))-handling between pc and mac.

Mac flash (in FF 1.5 or 2) - popup blocker tripped if function call is in on(press) rather than on(release) - on PC = doesn't care.. why!?
Even more irritating: in Mac player, popup blocker is tripped if the popup-request function is in a function called by the XML-response-handler function! - and on the PC there's no problem. So I have a "save stuff" function, which if it gets back "ok" in the XML, wants (needs) to pop up an HTML checkout. Works fine on PC - totally impossible on MAC.
that's just rubbish!!
There's clearly a "security-rating" passed from player to browser which is set differently on mac than PC - WHY!!!!????

Native 3D or at least support asymmetrical skewing/quad points.

Better rendering of vectors. Rounded corners on rectangles still look horrible.

Components: Remove known bugs, reduce file size, and make them easier to skin.

Ability to create a custom cursor which doesn't scale with the main movie.

Better sound quality.

I'm not sure if you're still taking feedback, but there are few things that I think would improve the flash player. In order of importance:

1) Render playback to native vector hardware (GPU for example). I've seen some impressive stuff done with AMANITH (rendering 2D vectors to 3D hardware), so it seems doable. With Both windows Vista and MacOS X (and even linux) switching to doing all their 2D compositing on the GPU, it seems like flash should go in this direction, as CPU speeds aren't increasing (only scaling accross threads.)

2) Put flash native movie export in the player instead-of/or-in-addition-to the flash export in the flash program. I don't know how many times I've seen something cool done in flash, but some trick was done in actionscript that makes it only work in the player and not the development environment. Pretty much I want the ability to make flash render frame-by-frame to avi/mpg/mp4/h264/etc(through whatever system available frameserver model) , maybe as an option in the stand-alone flash player, not necessairly the flash browser plugin. All the software I've seen do this so far attempts to take 30 screenshots per second of the flash clientwindow, or re-imports the flash file at 1fps.

3) Build in support for system-available .h264/AVC/mp4 . What I find a bit obnoxious is that youtube and googlevideo (now one and the same) take the source video (be it mpeg2 or something else) and compress it to the point that it macroblocks in the flash player. The solution seems to be allowing people to compress and fine tune their video exported so that recompression for the flash player is unnecessary. I don't see a way to do this currently. Really, you can play mp4 and/or AVC on the 5th generation ipod, the sony psp, the Gameboy Advance(play-yan), and a pile of other stuff. So let's say I wanted to distribute a DVD which contains mpeg-2 for the DVD player, and h264 HD , the flash player would be a good option, and then flash can just be auto-run and a customer movie player/menu system in flash would be there. h264/AVC is the new MP3 of Video, in which prior to h264, people just didn't share videos, or they took videos with their picture cameras that output mpeg-1 or MJPEG.

Licensing aside, it seems counter-intuitive to not support the current hot standard. Since people are able to make podcasts for their ipods and other handhelds, h264/avc/mp4 seems like it's the only standard common to all these devices, which means flash should too. Who knows, maybe it might be like mp3 which untill it was put in the flash player, people didn't really like to make cartoons with flash since the audio quality had to be degraded to sound like a speak-and-read.

smaller stuff, while the stuff above has been purely why the flash player frustrates me...

4) Is there a reason why there is no "camera" for the flash stage/scene? It seems that since the data is already generated, that it would take less CPU to render the entire stage and symbols into RAM, and then composite based on the camera position than the current method of having to move everything or rely on actionscript to manipulate the stage size/position, resulting in a severe CPU bottleneck. It shouldn't be dropping frames on top-of-the-line equipment. This goes back to the "allow exporting flash from the flash player", I still want the output of flash without the frame drops, so I'd rather export to something that I could put on dvd or a ipod podcast.

5)Joystick/HID support. It seems one of the shortfalls of being able to use flash for games is that you are limited to just the keyboard and the left mouse button, when most standard HID joysticks have at least 4 buttons (and most resemble PS2 controllers and have at least 10 buttons and two axis), most mice have 3 buttons, can we reclaim the right mouse button or reassign it to the middle? Or maybe be able to turn the right-click menu off and call our own function that fallsback to the right click menu?

6) This seems to me more of an issue with the flash development environment, but it seems like one can never use actionscript if they want to export a flash for a "movie", since the actionscript isn't obeyed in the flash development environment, it sometimes takes multiple trial and error phases, which is time consuming when the there is a lot of data to export. Why doesn't the flash development environment not use the flash player in exporting?
7)Any possibility of putting native Inverse Kinmatic physics in? I've seen only one flash where someone wrote up one in action script, it seems like the animation data can be scaled down significantly if I could just pin the parts of an animation I want to tween instead of having to make one layer per symbol that moves.
8)Crop to client window. I'd really like the ability to just crop everything outside the "movie" window so that when the user resizes the window, it crops to the aspect ratio defined in the movie. To the same extent, maybe a way for the flash player to be able to get the screen size and aspect ratio. This way one can create a 4:3, 16:9 and 221:100 flash crop points to best take advantage of screen real estate. For the most part a lot of flash animation that is full-screened, tends to have parts that were designed for a smaller clientwindow area, so it results in artifacts ranging from symbols not being hidden off-camera, to having strange effects on games that assume the movie hasn't been resized.

I have one 1920x1200(pc), one 1440x900(mac) and one 1280x1024(pc's second) screen, so full-screening on one screen doesn't have the same effect as it does on another. In particular, since the laptop has such a large display area, flash slows down quite significantly, which goes back to the point of just wanting to export to something native from the flash player itself and the n playback at the systems native resolution at full speed. The current trick I've relied on pretty much takes the flash player, runs the flash at 1fps, and takes clientwindow screenshots and dumps to bitmaps, which at 1920x1200 is beyond silly at 9.2MB per frame, yet can't compress fast enough to not drop frames from the flash player. I can't simply export from the flash development environment because the actionscript is ignored (like the scripted camera.)

Anyways, that's most of my thoughts, Maybe in closing I'll say that the current flash player seems to leak memory on both the mac and windows versions, that if I leave the browser open on some page with a flash banner ad, it might lock up after a few hours (and with the PC, lock up hard.) Perhaps there is a way to have a "do not autoplay/play flash unless clientwindow focused" option in the actual player that the user can toggle. The only current way to implement this is with flashblocker extensions.

CONTEXT MENU to allow chinese/arabic/hebrew characters when compiling from an EN tool.......I added chinese items to a menu, and they all show up as "????" not good, made my whole tool worthless on the chinese market.......

How about create a FlashPlayer Extension Interface that allow users to create FlashPlayer Extensions for user specified functions?

Just like the browser can load plugins that FlashPlayer can also load extensions from a directory. I think it will open a great way to FlashPlayer under Linux. This may bring Standalone FlashPlayer to replace the window system to be a more user friendly platform.

The most irritating thing for me in the Flash 8 player is the size limit of 2880 x 2880 pixels on images... Your excuse for having this limit is even more stupid (you say the limit there to avoid movies from using alot of memory). One can just have many smaller images which may fill up the entire memory... So please, give us a better excuse...

Now days with the advance of digital cameras, its common to have images bigger the 2880 x 2800, and its really lame that Flash 8 dosent support them...

/Mario