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Macromedia: Shockwave Flash for UNIX

Since Linux is supported by Macromedia, and the SWF format description was released, we have some interest to provide some creation-tools.

1. Introduction
2. Example
3. Documentation
4. Authoring Tools & Libraries

Flash animations is an "open" animation file-format defined by Macromedia, Flash File Format Specification. We consider it as worthwhile to support it further with some tools (we plan to develop) to create flash-animations (.swf).

Download either

• the official Maromedia LINUX plugin or
• the Open Source Flash plugin (GPL) written by Olivier Debon.

Both versions are still a bit buggy, and your browser may crash all of the sudden.

Macromedia Flash 2. Example

Click with right-button to invoke popup menu of the plugin (only when you used Macromedia Linux plug-in).

The animation was created by Olivier Debon, creator of the Open Source Flash plugin (GPL). The swfparse-output of linux.swf you find here.

Note: We used a small CGI flash.cgi which simply forces the correct content-type despite of the server settings. For details on MIME-type setting for web-server check Flash Support.

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"

width="150" height="120" NAME="sw" ID="sw"

codebase="http://the-labs.com/MacromediaFlash/flash.cgi?">

<param name="Movie" value="linux.swf">

<param name="quality" value="best">

<param name="Loop" value="true">

<param name="play" value="true">

<embed src="flash.cgi?linux.swf" width=150 height=120 bgcolor=#000000>

</object>

This is the original flash-intro from Macromedia. Also the swfparse-output: flash_intro.dump.

How To Flash Support pages to create flash-animations	ShockZone Macromedia collection of Flash2/3 sites	FlashPad Webboard for flash discussion
OpenSWF Newsgroup Open SWF standard discussion	OpenSWF OpenSWF site	FlashCentral.Com Another place to go

Macromedia Flash 3. Documentation

Original documentation from Macromedia:

Flash File Format Specification Original documentation

SWF Specifications (local) The details

Sample Source Code (local) SWF C++ parsers etc

Macromedia Flash 4. Authoring Tools & Libraries

Developing SWF files with WYSIWYG approach (like Macromedia tools) under UNIX is not available (status Oct 2001). Yet, some libraries have been written and script-interfaces (e.g. such as perl and php):

LIBSWF Another libswf in C++	SWF to SVG Conversion From one animation format to another	MING SWF library with interface to PHP, Python etc (not Perl yet)
SWFsource Another library C++	SWFTools Another library	FlashSynthesizer (SWFLib) libswf.a library to write SWF animations (no source-code)
PerlFlash (Flash.pm) Perl interface to libswf.a (at least partially)

We are certainly interested to develop high-level tools for SWF (and also SVG), some ideas:

• dedicated scripting language (human readable)
  • data visualization (weather forecast, 3d animation etc)
  • dynamic (on-the-fly) swf creation (CGI etc)
• sound-conversion (to adpcm)
• video-stream conversion (see ffmpeg-server to stream swf)
• ...

                                                                                                                                   

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