[Baypiggies] Talk about Django on Google Video?

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Fri May 5 22:58:31 CEST 2006


On May 5, 2006, at 1:39 PM, Andy Wiggin wrote:

> On 5/5/06, Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:
>>
>> Flash is ubiquitous and works decently in-browser.
>
> Bob,
> it's not really ubiquitous. At least, everytime firefox running on my
> powerpc linux box looks for a plugin, it's not available. I agree with
> the earlier post, that flash is closed, controlled and limited format.
> But maybe that's due to my powerpc linux box perspective.

It is absolutely the PowerPC linux perspective. The Flash player  
ships with the other (only) popular PPC OS, and it can be made to  
work on just about any of the x86 platforms (if one tries hard  
enough, anyway).

The Flash format isn't entirely closed, and I don't even know what  
"limited" is supposed to mean. As for openness, there are only two  
proprietary codecs in Flash (Adobe licenses these from third  
parties): On2 VP6 (video) and the Nellymoser audio (voice). All other  
aspects of the Flash file formats are open -- either by reverse  
engineering or published specifications (though the license attached  
to that spec doesn't please everyone, it disallows creating a player  
using that knowledge).

However, all of this is totally irrelevant to the initial question  
because Google Video also provides DivX encoded video, and I'm sure  
that the H.263 FLV files that google video produces are playable or  
at least can be transcoded using an entirely open source stack  
(though not conveniently in-browser AFAIK).

-bob



More information about the Baypiggies mailing list