[squeak-dev] Re: Playing Flash movies in-image

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Wed Dec 29 17:28:29 UTC 2010


On 12/29/2010 6:16 PM, Chris Cunnington wrote:
> No. In fact, I don't know how you could be playing a Flash movie in a
> Sophie image, because the Flash player there is so old
> that it only understands swf file animations. It couldn't play movies
> because that was still five years off.

Because Sophie uses Quicktime for all its media needs. Quicktime 
supports Flash just fine.

> As far as I can read the history, in the late 90s Squeakers explored
> existing multimedia, then they went crazy with originality.
> What they built is so pervasive it's hard to see it, because it changed
> the environment. Basically, this was a pre-Croquet/Etoys/Tweak period.

I wrote the Flash player for Disney projects and we used it there. The 
reason it was never updated was because Macromedia (which owned Flash at 
this point) changed their policy on releasing the SWF spec - in order to 
obtain the spec for SWF > 3.0 one had to agree to NOT write any player 
for SWF files; you were only allowed to use that documentation to CREATE 
output in SWF. So a complete no-go for us (I have not checked what 
recent policy is).

> They dropped Flash and never picked it up again, while creating insane
> graphics using the SurfacePlugin and scripting (which uses time stamped
> MessageSends in a queue to substitute single processes for multi-threading.)
> This era started with this memo:
>
> http://tweakproject.org/ABOUT/FAQ/OriginalTweakMemo/
>
> (I can't remember who wrote it. I don't think he's here anymore. :P)

I wrote the memo, I own the site, and methinks I'm still around ...

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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