Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Thank you, Charles. Bryan, to your original point: There are a lot of great education activities done in Flash and their # will only increase simply because it is very easy to develop animations using flash. Check out www.eshikshaindia.in for more great learning animations. Those did not work w/ Gnash when I tried it last month. We /do/ want people making great education activities to make them compatible with open source Flash players, now that Gnash is becoming a viable instance of one. You don't have time to convert them youreslf, but the people who made them do, if they are maintaining their work. We also want to make customization of machines in a local deployment easier. I am not sure that your suggestion of adding a symlink to all builds that points to a subdirectory of /home/olpc for mozilla plugins is the way to go, but if you have specific requests of that nature you should file a ticket with the request. That seems to have been lost in the email exchange. SJ On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 1:38 AM, Charles Merriam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I think I added all the substance from this thread into the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gnash). It's late, so I would apprecate Rob et al doing a quick read. Also, can someone add more information about the specific gnash version/codecs being installed on which XOs and confirm that the primary issue in developing Flash for Gnash is picking open codecs? Have a great day! or evening! Charles Merriam On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve Holton wrote: Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. They've already changed the format in a big, hence all our hard work to reverse engineer SWF v9. ActionScript 3 is finally ECMAScript compatible, same as JavaScript, so I doubt that'll change much in the future. Also all the changes in SWF v9 were performance oriented, and that required a new VM. Gnash now does support the SWF v9 format changes, that was easy. It's implementing the ActionScript class libraries that's much of the work left. SWF has evolved very slowly, so I don't feel we'll be chasing Adobe for long. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. Yes, but as far as I can tell, OpenOffice works well enough with M$ Office, compatibility wise, that I haven't had to use M$ Office for many years. Not everything converts in OO 100% all the time, but what doesn't work I can easily live with. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. New standards still don't solve the problem of playing existing content (often proprietary), which is what I though we were discussing. Also playing SWF files in the future is not something we worry about, since that will only effect new content, which doesn't exist yet. :-) My point is that we want people to work with us. Most of the time all I hear is Gnash sucks, it's not 100% compatible yet. We know that already... What we want to do is identify what sucks, produce test cases, and then fix the problems. Bitching about the problem and dumping Gnash does not solve the problem, it merely ignores it. It's the easy way out. Yes, it can take some time for an end user with a problem to work with us till we identify what is wrong. As none of us can use the Adobe player due to clean room problems, it's our end users that help us work on testing compatibility. Many people have helped contribute to the development of Gnash merely by helping answer questions about what's wrong, and trying patches, and most of them were not professional engineers. All we are asking for is help beyond just griping, and patience as our small team pushes forward. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu We seem to agree on the principles, and we can recruit for each of the alternatives. -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:15 AM, Charbax [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How about OLPC putting pressure of Adobe from the top, pulling Adobes ear and putting public pressure on Adobe to release a free and open optimized flash player for the OLPC project. Sure. Now what would you need, Charbax, in order to recode the videos you have for the XO? Or how about a repository package manager app in Sugar (usable even by children) to easily install and uninstall free and non-free software in one click. Flash, Opera, Skype, Mplayer, video games emulators all these would be nice if they could be added in just one click without the need to use the terminal and would be I guess needed for all these to be optimized to work the best. Google shows several Yum GUI programs. It is my understanding that such a project is already planned, but others can provide more information. On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 5:16 AM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hal Murray wrote: I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser. Am I missing something? Tamarin is a small fraction of the code needed to do a flash VM. Even starting with Tamarin you'd have many years of development. All Tamarin is is an ActionScript interpreter, SWF is much more complex than that. - rob - -- Charbax, Nicolas Charbonnier ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 9:16 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hal Murray wrote: I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser. Am I missing something? Tamarin is a small fraction of the code needed to do a flash VM. Even starting with Tamarin you'd have many years of development. All Tamarin is is an ActionScript interpreter, SWF is much more complex than that. So where is Gnash? What can we look forward to in the next release? What help do you need? - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Gnash supports all the proprietary codecs, the issue is that the OLPC can't ship Gnash enable for these codecs due to US patent law. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. Usually this is the fastest way to get something working with Gnash. If the developer test with Gnash, it's often a tiny bit of additional work. The problem is nobody tests with Gnash but a few free software developers... I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. The OLPC already bundles Gnash with the XO. The issues are often one of missing codecs for multimedia support, and completeness. While Gnash handle SWF v7 reasonably well, much newer content is coming out in SWF v8 and v9, which we're still working on. As Gnash uses ffmpeg and gstreamer, it can actually handle any supported video format, including the new high quality YouTube one (H.264), as well as Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and Dirac. For the XO, I'd think one would want to be using Theora or Vorbis instead of something proprietary. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: So where is Gnash? What can we look forward to in the next release? The latest release was about 2 weeks ago. :-) We put snapshot builds up on http://www.getgnash.org and we recently got buildbot up and running, those builds currently go in http://www.gnashdev.org/buildbot. What help do you need? Seriously ? :-) We need more resources for the Gnash project. We are a tiny handful of people working hard on doing a clean room SWF player. The few of us work all day, every day on Gnash More people volunteering to work on Gnash, funding help, test cases would all help us achieve compatibility with SWF v9 in a reasonable amount of time. Most people, and this includes the majority of OLPC users, just go Gnash doesn't work or Gnash will never be complete, and just install the Adobe player as the easy path to what they're used to. If people were willing to work with us on actually tracking down what the bugs are so we can fix them, or working on producing SWF content that has been tested with Gnash, we'd get more accomplished. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Charbax wrote: filmed myself, I can encode a version in Ogg Theora I think, though is there a way to automatically stream Ogg Theora in full screen on the olpc laptop? The simplest way I know is to write a 5 line Flash program to load the file from disk and play it. If you use Gnash, it'll just work. I hope gnash will work sometime soon, with some ways to playback Youtube and all other flash video sites in full screen and smoothly. There is no other Gnash has supported YouTube, and other video sites (not all) for over a year, and we also support a -fullscreen option. My own builds of Gnash for the XO work reasonably well, but due to patent laws, I can't redistribute those builds. The other problem becomes the libraries we depend on, like Gstreamer, change frequently, so Gnash breaks often after upgrades. So most people just assume Gnash is incredibly far from even working at all, which is far from reality. theora encoded videos and all that. I just think that perhaps OLPC would be a good way to put pressure on the established software patent holders, so that they stop blocking Linux from having good, smooth, legal access to what have become web standards for video codecs such as flash video and Mpeg4, VOIP such as Skype, audio codecs such as Mp3, website design such as flash animations. Proprietary formats that have become so popular on the web need to be opened up by new laws and regulation or by popular pressure on those companies that purposefully block interoperability on those certain features. I've recently formed a new 501c6 non-profit to do exactly this. While continuing to work on Gnash, and emphasize patent free codecs, we also plan to pursue other means of legally decoding proprietary formats. We already can support the proprietary codecs using ffmpeg, but would like to deal with the patent issue in a legal way. Fluendo has done this, Redhat is trying to negotiate a way to do this now, so maybe we can too... Our hope is that we can raise sufficient funding through our new organization to not only accelerate the progress of Gnash, but to work on the legal and political aspects as well. Those of us that develop free software have special concerns, and as far as I can tell, there is nobody else trying to improve the situation for us all. So we're going to try... So if people want to see this situation improve, please support us in this task. (insert generic fund raising plea here) - rob - http://www.openmedianow.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Charbax, It's great if OLPC can push for creating an open free standard for online video using Ogg Theora or push some other codec to become open free standard to use, create new video portals with ogg theora encoded videos and all that. I am a big time advocate of open-source and free software. OLPC is about many things but particularly about leveraging open-source software to improve education It is not about leveraging education to enhance open-source software projects. Proprietary codecs and plugins won't go away (as much as I wish they would). We need to allow kids to access open content that happens to be in a proprietary format, ASAP. Bryan Kathmandu On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 15:13 +0100, Charbax wrote: On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 9:10 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now what would you need, Charbax, in order to recode the videos you have for the XO? 95% of the videos I post at http://olpc.tv are videos people posted at Youtube and other flash video portals. I think it probably would be illegal to grab the flash video files and encode them to some other format such as Ogg Theora and republish them without asking each of the content providers for permission. The 5% of the videos in this category http://olpc.tv/channel/charbax/ that I filmed myself, I can encode a version in Ogg Theora I think, though is there a way to automatically stream Ogg Theora in full screen on the olpc laptop? I hope gnash will work sometime soon, with some ways to playback Youtube and all other flash video sites in full screen and smoothly. There is no other way then to get the webs video standards to work if you want the kids to access the current online video. It's great if OLPC can push for creating an open free standard for online video using Ogg Theora or push some other codec to become open free standard to use, create new video portals with ogg theora encoded videos and all that. I just think that perhaps OLPC would be a good way to put pressure on the established software patent holders, so that they stop blocking Linux from having good, smooth, legal access to what have become web standards for video codecs such as flash video and Mpeg4, VOIP such as Skype, audio codecs such as Mp3, website design such as flash animations. Proprietary formats that have become so popular on the web need to be opened up by new laws and regulation or by popular pressure on those companies that purposefully block interoperability on those certain features. -- Charbax, Nicolas Charbonnier ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
I'd just like to second Bryan's viewpoint here. Hewing to the open media line has been impossible for my small deployment, and my past experience supporting technology in a larger school context is consistent with this. Find a sensible middle ground to make it easy and seamless for those deploying the XS/XO combination in real schools to install ubiquitous free (as in beer) components, and work toward better licenses and open codecs as a background goal. There is just too much to do for the kids. In the specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. Frankly I don't have the time for this, preparing for a deployment is extremely time-consuming. If I were to recode them, I fear I would find a whole new set of flash-based materials that would need to be recoded. On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 00:58 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu We seem to agree on the principles, and we can recruit for each of the alternatives. ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open -- Always do right, said Mark Twain. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Carol Lerche wrote: Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary formats, even for worthy causes. :-( specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing, we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. Most of the bugs we find and aren't that time consuming to fix. We're just a tiny team of people. With some support we could hit that magical spot were we play enough of the existing SWF content that nobody cares about the few things that don't work. Our SWF v8 and v9 support is already starting to work, along with initial support for ActionScript 3, making many new sites work. With some support (test cases, working with us, funding, engineering) we could push Gnash ahead much sooner than most people realize is possible. While this doesn't solve the problem *now*, it does let us work towards eliminating this as a problem in the future. I'm also a homeschooling parent, so thinking about leaving a better future behind for my children is more important to me than short term goals. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
OLPC cannot currently preload the Adobe Flash player--you'll have to load the rpm yourself. This is obvious, but OLPC could make it easier for implementers to install flash and proprietary codecs using bundles and the customization key. the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. You can install the plugin for your own deployment. Unfortunately OLPC, nor anyone else, can include the plugin in a piece of software that can be downloaded from the Internet. On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 12:15 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I don't think anyone is saying, don't use Flash. But it comes at a cost: OLPC cannot currently preload the Adobe Flash player--you'll have to load the rpm yourself. But perhaps more to the point, Adobe may or may not make an effort to improve the quality of Flash on the XO laptop. The Gnash team--with help from the community--will make that effort. So, it seems that when and where we can, we should be supporting Gnash. -walter 2008/3/24 Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'd just like to second Bryan's viewpoint here. Hewing to the open media line has been impossible for my small deployment, and my past experience supporting technology in a larger school context is consistent with this. Find a sensible middle ground to make it easy and seamless for those deploying the XS/XO combination in real schools to install ubiquitous free (as in beer) components, and work toward better licenses and open codecs as a background goal. There is just too much to do for the kids. In the specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. Frankly I don't have the time for this, preparing for a deployment is extremely time-consuming. If I were to recode them, I fear I would find a whole new set of flash-based materials that would need to be recoded. On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 00:58 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu We seem to agree on the principles, and we can recruit for each of the alternatives. ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open -- Always do right, said Mark Twain. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carol Lerche wrote: Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary formats, even for worthy causes. :-( specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing, (translation: we want to avoid this...) we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. But here you lost me. Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. (The point is largely moot. Adobe realizes the market will be very limited for Flash-type services among third-world XO users with limited internet connectivity and bandwidth. But other proprietary vendors such as Intel and Microsoft have much more to lose if the children of the world are exposed to non-proprietary technology by the millions. It should be clear that Microsoft's generous offer to port Windows XP to the XO is motivated by exactly this business rationale.) -- Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Presumably the new standard is SVG. SVG animation, AFAIK, is not yet quite in the same league re Flash in terms of tools and support. -walter On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carol Lerche wrote: Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary formats, even for worthy causes. :-( specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing, (translation: we want to avoid this...) we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. But here you lost me. Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. (The point is largely moot. Adobe realizes the market will be very limited for Flash-type services among third-world XO users with limited internet connectivity and bandwidth. But other proprietary vendors such as Intel and Microsoft have much more to lose if the children of the world are exposed to non-proprietary technology by the millions. It should be clear that Microsoft's generous offer to port Windows XP to the XO is motivated by exactly this business rationale.) -- Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Steve Holton wrote: Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. They've already changed the format in a big, hence all our hard work to reverse engineer SWF v9. ActionScript 3 is finally ECMAScript compatible, same as JavaScript, so I doubt that'll change much in the future. Also all the changes in SWF v9 were performance oriented, and that required a new VM. Gnash now does support the SWF v9 format changes, that was easy. It's implementing the ActionScript class libraries that's much of the work left. SWF has evolved very slowly, so I don't feel we'll be chasing Adobe for long. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. Yes, but as far as I can tell, OpenOffice works well enough with M$ Office, compatibility wise, that I haven't had to use M$ Office for many years. Not everything converts in OO 100% all the time, but what doesn't work I can easily live with. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. New standards still don't solve the problem of playing existing content (often proprietary), which is what I though we were discussing. Also playing SWF files in the future is not something we worry about, since that will only effect new content, which doesn't exist yet. :-) My point is that we want people to work with us. Most of the time all I hear is Gnash sucks, it's not 100% compatible yet. We know that already... What we want to do is identify what sucks, produce test cases, and then fix the problems. Bitching about the problem and dumping Gnash does not solve the problem, it merely ignores it. It's the easy way out. Yes, it can take some time for an end user with a problem to work with us till we identify what is wrong. As none of us can use the Adobe player due to clean room problems, it's our end users that help us work on testing compatibility. Many people have helped contribute to the development of Gnash merely by helping answer questions about what's wrong, and trying patches, and most of them were not professional engineers. All we are asking for is help beyond just griping, and patience as our small team pushes forward. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Hi All, I think I added all the substance from this thread into the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gnash). It's late, so I would apprecate Rob et al doing a quick read. Also, can someone add more information about the specific gnash version/codecs being installed on which XOs and confirm that the primary issue in developing Flash for Gnash is picking open codecs? Have a great day! or evening! Charles Merriam On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve Holton wrote: Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. They've already changed the format in a big, hence all our hard work to reverse engineer SWF v9. ActionScript 3 is finally ECMAScript compatible, same as JavaScript, so I doubt that'll change much in the future. Also all the changes in SWF v9 were performance oriented, and that required a new VM. Gnash now does support the SWF v9 format changes, that was easy. It's implementing the ActionScript class libraries that's much of the work left. SWF has evolved very slowly, so I don't feel we'll be chasing Adobe for long. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. Yes, but as far as I can tell, OpenOffice works well enough with M$ Office, compatibility wise, that I haven't had to use M$ Office for many years. Not everything converts in OO 100% all the time, but what doesn't work I can easily live with. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. New standards still don't solve the problem of playing existing content (often proprietary), which is what I though we were discussing. Also playing SWF files in the future is not something we worry about, since that will only effect new content, which doesn't exist yet. :-) My point is that we want people to work with us. Most of the time all I hear is Gnash sucks, it's not 100% compatible yet. We know that already... What we want to do is identify what sucks, produce test cases, and then fix the problems. Bitching about the problem and dumping Gnash does not solve the problem, it merely ignores it. It's the easy way out. Yes, it can take some time for an end user with a problem to work with us till we identify what is wrong. As none of us can use the Adobe player due to clean room problems, it's our end users that help us work on testing compatibility. Many people have helped contribute to the development of Gnash merely by helping answer questions about what's wrong, and trying patches, and most of them were not professional engineers. All we are asking for is help beyond just griping, and patience as our small team pushes forward. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. I thought Adobe already opened up. From: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/061206.html Wednesday, December 6, 2006 The Adobe Flash Player is almost universally available on desktop computers, yet many people are not even aware of its existence or of its capabilities. It is a client application that is accessible within most web browsers and features support for vector and raster graphics, audio and video streaming and a scripting language; ActionScript. The scripting language is executed by a virtual machine (VM), the internals of which, will be the focus of this talk. I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser. Am I missing something? My memory from the talk is that ActionScript == ECMAScript == Javascript. Flash sends a compiled version of the script so it's obfuscated enough that you can't easily see what it is doing. Here is Mozilla's version of the press release: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html SAN FRANCISCO -- November 7, 2006 -- Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript^(TM) Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications. The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla's free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Seth Woodworth Wrote: Holy Crap! That's amazing. We need this *on* the laptops. Curse you flash! Does it work alright in gnash? Or should we transcode it? There are a lot of great education activities done in Flash and their # will only increase simply because it is very easy to develop animations using flash. Check out www.eshikshaindia.in for more great learning animations. Those did not work w/ Gnash when I tried it last month. I have a lot of respect for what the Gnash guys have done but the best strategy would be to make it easy for deployment teams to bundle flash w/ the XO. So many Internet sites depend on it. From my understanding of the Adobe license terms, you can distribute Flash w/in an intranet, which I judge to mean I can install it on the XO's for Nepal's pilot schools. One thing is definitely clear, you cannot bundle flash into an xo image available on the internet. However, I believe that I can make the flash plugin to a school intranet via the XS and still conform to the Adobe license. AFAIK the flash plugin only requires one file to be installed as far as I can tell libflashplayer.so The easiest way technically to do this would be to put in a symlink from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /home/olpc/mozilla/plugins and then modify the customization key script to look for flash and other plugins and copy them to the home/.../plugins folder Bryan Kathmandu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
