David Herron's Blog

Open media and open screens

On an earlier blog posting a commenter asked: "I would like to know how to use the VLC media player stack as the media handler for OpenJDK.." so, yeah, I hear you, there are many asking for better media support in the Java platform. It's with interest that I read Adobe's announcement today of the Open Screen Project. Hey, cool, if you dig around there are documents describing the byte level details of the SWF and FLV and F4V formats. I feel as Nick Main does in 'SWF Spec is now less restrictive !' I've also thought it would be great to have a SWF player implemented in Java and using the newest graphics improvements in the latest JRE's. And, hey, the documents are right there that says in details what the SWF/FLV/etc formats are, especially as they are saying "removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications".

We should be clear, however, that this appears not to be an open source announcement despite Adobe's use of the word 'Open'. Not being a lawyer the following is my best understanding - the documents are under a restrictive license that allows you to print the document once, and you cannot redistribute those documents. So the specification is openly published, as they say, but not open source. I couldn't find any software source code, FWIW.

Comments

• "this appears not to be an open source announcement despite Adobe's use of the word 'Open'. Not being a lawyer the following is my best understanding - the documents are under a restrictive license that allows you to print the document once, and you cannot redistribute those documents. So the specification is openly published, as they say, but not open source. I couldn't find any software source code, FWIW." It doesn't make any difference what they let you do with the documents with regards to redistribution etc. If they have published the specs, it's perfectly legal for anyone to use those specs to create software compatible with the spec. It's the same situation with Samba and Windows networking, I think... FC

  Posted by: fcassia_at_gmail on May 05, 2008 at 02:51 AM

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