> In my opinion, as long as the SWF format specification continue to be > proprietary, free software users will always have a bad experience > with content served in that format. That's why Gnash won't work the > same as the Adobe Flash Player.
Adobe published some specifications related to SWF, I don't know how useful they are. Non-SWF-related things done by Gnash don't look simple. > As for things like Flash Video Replacer, those kinds of scripts won't > work well for long because video Web sites seem to change the way they > work, very often. Since August 2010 WatchVideo needed 7 changes to get videos from YouTube due to their changes (TinyOgg used very similar code and needed similar changes). I wouldn't call it "very often". Flash Video Replacer solves a more difficult problem than just finding from where to get the video file and opening it in a VLC-like media player, so it might need more changes. I like tools which get the video without running the scripts on the site, since I have more control on what they do (and VLC has much better interface than some YouTube-like sites) and my network is often too slow to watch the video without downloading it completely before (contributing to such programs is another reason). > Maybe because they don't like people downloading the > videos they host? I don't see other reasons to not use HTML 5 video tags, with Flash for just old browsers (would be simpler, work the same way on many sites, and allow easily downloading the videos).
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