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April 21, 2007
"Open source" and video
"Open source" and video: What should members of the opensource movement feel about web video? Miguel de Icaza, of GNOME and Mono, examines Microsoft's recent acknowledgment of richer web experiences, and concludes: "Google Video and YouTube popularized the use of Flash for delivering video and it quickly became the norm for video delivery. This opened the doors to the Linux desktop users to watch video content just like everyone else and the pain had been mostly eliminated... Lacking a viable open source-based competitor today for rich media delivery on the web and given the current state of both Flash and Silverlight, it is in open source's best interest to ensure that Flash gets ahead of the competition." The Adobe business is about enabling publishing in general, and doesn't cross-sell systems like Microsoft and Apple do, so there's naturally more emphasis on inclusiveness. It's challenging to provide predictable capability across many varied environments, but that's the goal.
Later he seeks a "text-based format to populating the flash contents, either from a JSON representation or an XML file." I'm not clear what he's seeking to describe in JSON/XML, whether it's simple data (which has been around for years), or interface behavior (Flex 2 SDK), or something else.
"An open specification that allows for third-party implementations. My understanding is that today's Flash specification is semi-open." It's true that Adobe hasn't invested much time in describing what other SWF renderers "should" do when encountering varied errors. The goal has been to make it easier to deploy rich content to the audience -- a creator-centric view -- rather than make it harder by having to hassle multiple clientside implementations. PostScript opened up desktop publishing by making printing predictable. (I'm not sure how to distinguish "half-open" from "open" here.)
He then describes the steps necessary to reproduce a Player implementation in HTML/JS techniques. It looks like he's seeking an implementation, a codebase under his preferred control, rather than an open functionality which anyone can use to deploy content. He seeks to convert Flash content into CANVAS tags, for instance, rather than the opposite way around. The question seems less to be "How can I make this project with the CANVAS tag?" than it is "How can we view the web's content with 'our' CANVAS tag and codebase?"
Posted by JohnDowdell at April 21, 2007 09:32 AM
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