Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

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iwod
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Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by iwod »

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

I really hope this replace Flash, much more so then PDF.js since there are already many decent alternative to Adobe Reader. And the chance you ever run into SWF files are much much greater then PDF files.

Not to mention i much prefer open SWF to succeed then SVG.
bjherbison
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by bjherbison »

My view is different. If we had open SWF most people would still use Flash, and Flash is a constant source of security issues.
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Stifu
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by Stifu »

bjherbison wrote:My view is different. If we had open SWF most people would still use Flash, and Flash is a constant source of security issues.

But the security issues come from the fact it's a plugin, don't they? This is standard web client code, not native code.
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by bjherbison »

Stifu wrote:
bjherbison wrote:My view is different. If we had open SWF most people would still use Flash, and Flash is a constant source of security issues.

But the security issues come from the fact it's a plugin, don't they? This is standard web client code, not native code.

That does help Firefox users, but I'm also worried about the people who don't use Firefox and are stuck with the standard Flash implementation.
flaneurb
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by flaneurb »

I installed the add-on and disabled Adobe Flash. But I can't get non-HTML5 videos on YouTube to play at all. A little Shumway logo appears briefly but then a notice appears about needing to download Adobe Flash, etc.

Are there links to sample videos to try with Shumway?

Oops: http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/
iwod
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by iwod »

bjherbison wrote:My view is different. If we had open SWF most people would still use Flash, and Flash is a constant source of security issues.


Security matters to implementation, not the SWF. Mozilla would take SWF to where Adobe would have have done before.

Crap may be it would be easier if Adobe just open source the god damn thing.
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by Srap »

bjherbison wrote:Crap may be it would be easier if Adobe just open source the god damn thing.

Adobe guys are discretely trying to force Mozilla to buy Flash (like MS and Google did) with these crash-fests: "You'll either lose half of the users because of us, or you will buy the code for a good sum and clean it up yourselves!"

Just joking. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if we find out that this was their actual plan.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by patrickjdempsey »

If have my reservations about this tech because in the end it still runs into the same old HTML5 Video problems: Flash video is a container for some other video format. So unless the video contained in the SWF is Theora or WebM, it's going to fail on Firefox. I know there is also work underway to allow Firefox to use OS codecs (at least where that is supported, not XP) so it makes slightly more sense when/if that comes to play. I just can't help but to think the whole thing is rather fragile.

Also, according to the great and powerful WIKI, some parts of SWF have remained secret, so the possibility of a totally error-free Flash player (if not why bother?) seems far fetched:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF
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faulty_fox
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by faulty_fox »

Doesn't chrome use it's own flash plugin? I don't know the details about this, i know that it must be very hard but why would they start a project that's impossible to complete?

Anyway i'm all in for a replacement to the buggy adobe plug-in. Does anyone have any more details about this?
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by patrickjdempsey »

No, Google teamed up with Adobe and created a whole new plugin format called Pepper and they are embedding it into Chrome. So not only is Adobe delivering a special build of Flash just for Chrome, but Chrome is then modifying it in who-knows-what-ways. So Adobe now ships multiple different builds of Flash: one for IE, one for Chrome (on PC, OSX, Linux), and one for *everybody else* which excludes Linux which they've stopped supporting.

Edit: and the Firefox version of the "everybody else" NPAPI Flash plugin has this crazy Protected Mode sandbox which is what is causing most of the severe crashy behavior these days, previously it was their implementation of hardware acceleration, and before that conflicts with Firefox's plugin-container sandbox. Aside from all of that Flash itself is more stable than it's been in a decade. LOL.
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iwod
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by iwod »

patrickjdempsey wrote:If have my reservations about this tech because in the end it still runs into the same old HTML5 Video problems: Flash video is a container for some other video format. So unless the video contained in the SWF is Theora or WebM, it's going to fail on Firefox. I know there is also work underway to allow Firefox to use OS codecs (at least where that is supported, not XP) so it makes slightly more sense when/if that comes to play. I just can't help but to think the whole thing is rather fragile.

Also, according to the great and powerful WIKI, some parts of SWF have remained secret, so the possibility of a totally error-free Flash player (if not why bother?) seems far fetched:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF


Well FFmepg manage to reverse engineering LOTS of proprietary codec. I suspect SWF is easier then doing that. With some resource backing.

I tested Flashblock and Shumway they seems to not work very well at the moment.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by patrickjdempsey »

No I mean once you decode an SWF that's being used as a video container, then you need to be able to play the video file, so you need the proper codecs for that, of which Firefox only ships Theora and WebM, and in the future for some OS's it will use the OS native codec's (whatever they may be). One of the appealing things about Flash as a video container is that it doesn't require the end user or the browser to handle any of the codecs. And since Microsoft and Apple decided to stick it to open source by refusing to adopt an open alternative to h.264, Flash still continues to be the best way to deliver video to the desktop, as much as I hate it.
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faulty_fox
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by faulty_fox »

Indeed flash is very versatile, however the performance issues make it almost unusable (at least for me).

I really hope they succeed with this project, here is the site where you can install the add-on and give it a test run http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/

Another cool thing i discovered recently is this userscript : ViewTube which enables you to you to use an alternative player for videos on some popular websites. Unfortunately there is not much choice really.
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by Bluefang »

patrickjdempsey wrote:If have my reservations about this tech because in the end it still runs into the same old HTML5 Video problems: Flash video is a container for some other video format. So unless the video contained in the SWF is Theora or WebM, it's going to fail on Firefox. I know there is also work underway to allow Firefox to use OS codecs (at least where that is supported, not XP) so it makes slightly more sense when/if that comes to play. I just can't help but to think the whole thing is rather fragile.


The formats that Flash supports are well defined, so it's not like there would be any surprises when it comes to the incoming media formats. But you are correct that codec support is an issue.

If anything at all comes out of this, I'd really like to see Firefox pick-up FLV/F4V container support (since I'm hoping Shumway will use HTML5 Audio/Video for the media handling). Native codec support is down the road, which should give us the common codecs (H.264, MP3, and AAC). IMHO this would make it much easier for media sites (i.e. YouTube) to switch away from flash, since a more significant portion of their existing media library (more than 0%) would be natively supported without any changes on their end.
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AnotherLife
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Re: Shumway - PDF.js for Flash

Post by AnotherLife »

I am positive there will never be a real Flash alternative. And if it's not 100%, people will not use it, so ...

Flash will just run its cycle, at some point it will die, but it will never be replaced. I can't believe someone had the balls to start a project like this, well, good for him I guess.
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