"I'm trying to play a flash movie (.flv - H.264, 320 x 216, Millions; AAC, Stereo, 22.050 kHz). I imported and played it successfully in OpenSophie, but before I attempt to port the code (which is Tweak-based) into Squeak, is there any currently existing code that can do this?"
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.
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. 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)
How you're playing a Flash movie I can't imagine, because they'd dropped that technology over a decade ago and movies started being played in Flash successfully five, six years ago.
"I see what you mean. I got stuck even before this process - if you can't bring up halos, how do you even know which class/method to *start* with?"
Well, yea. That's been a problem. For sure. But I don't believe in anything unless I can see it. I can assure you I'll never want to EVER watch a filmed movie of Macbeth when this project is over. I've heard Orson Wells intone too many times.
I know that the SophieMovie hierarchy is the place to start. And learning more about Tweak is slowly showing me how that model is connected to the view. If you want to take something from Tweak and put it in Morphic, and you don't want to have start it from a Workspace, then you need to know how to convert a CPlayer into a Player. And so it goes...
Chris