Re: [Gnash-dev] Can a flash script know what codecs are available?

[strk]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 01:17:51AM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> The folks at dailymotion.com have made an OLPC (prototype) version of
> their web site that displays in Ogg (test at olpc.dailymotion.com).  Is
> there a way for their ActionScript to be able to tell which codecs are
> available to the flash player?  Or to easily and quickly ask if Ogg
> (or FLV) is available?

We've been discussing this shortly on #gnash.
There's a standard System.capabilities.videoMIMETypes array 
which we may use to advertise our capability to deal mime-types.

It has to be considered that ogg is a container format, so might
contains other mime-types inside (even proprietary, as I've been
warned by Company [swfdec developer]). So I guess the SWF player
should check for every mime-type involved in the specific ogg
decoding.

Another issue is how to behave within the NetStream ActionScript
class, which was likely designed to deal with FLV only.
In particular, NetStream broadcast events like onMetaData, which
for FLV are actual AMF invoke tags, while it's undefined what
they'd be (if anything) for ogg.

Defining behaviour would help setting a standard to use at least
in the free flash world. Failing that, the only effective way
to be sure is checking player name and version, which should
be again available under the System namespace (but dunno the details);
note that this might also be not what user want to do (advertise they
are using Gnash) to avoid eventual intentional limit put on it by
publishers of DRM-covered content.


--strk;