[Gnash] rob savoye

[Martin Guy]

I'll tell you about my meeting with Rob Savoye a few days ago.

The Gnash Project has 4 components:

- the plugin/standalone player for Flash, 100% Open source, extensions
so you can do whatever you want. For example the Comsumer Electronics
Industry is very interested in flash as a user interface language eg
in cellphones, washing machines, car stereos etc. they want to run a
single flash application forever as the UI with custom actionscript
extensions that give access to eg the buttons on the device's front
panel or the touch screen or whatever. Net access via whatever
hardware: if you run it as a single application on top of Linux, it'll
talk to all known cheap hardware.

- a media database containing information about individual music
performances: date, location, group, support, track list, the
individual instruments used, track authors etc. Imagine, being able to
search a database for when a specific instrument was used. It's a
dead-head's dream, born of the need to index Rob Savoye's collection
of live Grateful Dead concerts. Another aspect of the DB indexes
tracks by the sample used at a specific moment, born of the hip-hop
and dj-mixing genres but also applicable to other music. The idea is
that fans on the net will contribute the absurd amount of detail that
is required for their favourite bands. i know I would gladly do that
for Delia Derbyshire, if maybe not down to the sample-events :)
They already have inherited cddb which became musicbrainz and are
thinking of employing their staff. But they want to go beyond cddb and
include track lyrics, scrape DVDs for subtitles to videos that you can
search and so on. They're mad.

- a media server which will allow people to upload stuff and serve it.
This is not a physical installation; it is a software which you can
run at home on a dodgy DSL for max 3 streams, or handling 100s of 000s
of streams simultaneously on a cluster. It's called Cygnus, comes with
the Gnash source tree and is currently a skeletal working
implementation.
Basically it just needs to read disk files and pipe them out a network
connection. It needs a member of staff to care for and develop it.

- a video media player written in Flash using (where unavoidable)
Gnash extentions to provide, e.g. seeking in video streams without
having to preload everything before the bit you want to see. And loads
of cool stuff... you can imagine...
Oh, and it talks to the media database (or course)

The opportunity for sim.one as a UI for big-league consumer
electronics is immense. People will want to run flash as the UI giving
a company stamp and exciting user experience. Gnash gives that for
free - with extensions you can adapt it to your device. Market selling
"porting Gnash to your device". $D

Gnash now runs on the video framebuffer without a graphic toolkit like
GTK, FLTK or SDL and somebody's working on the calibration code for
some touchscreen monitor.

Interesting times...

   M