Re: [Gnash-dev] Launcher scripts

[strk]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 08:20:11PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> > Doing so we'd let us control creation of it through the gui, so
> > that we may have a "File->SaveLauncherAs".
> 
> Great idea.  I think we should also provide a way to save external
> streams from gnash into local files, so that we can do "File->SaveAs".

Agreed, but designing the interface isn't that easy.

The "SaveLauncherAs" has the advantage that lets you run the launcher
with -v switch, grep SECURITY and thus get all URLS (loaded SWFs, XMLs,
JPGs, PNGs, FLVs....).

A File->SaveAs can easily save the top-level SWF, but there are a lot
of cases in which that by itself won't work. For instance, it may contain
some checks on the URL it is loaded from. Gnash could fake it with
a launcher, but saving the SWF itself won't help by itself.

> Ideally we could both offer the capability to only save streams
> (e.g. producing one or more .FLV files) and/or to save the entire
> flash movie and all its streams (producing a .SWF and a subdir
> containing a set of .FLVs and maybe other things, like Firefox's "Save
> Page As..." in the "Web Page, complete" format).

I like this idea (save application as). Again, wont' be easy as it might
require modifying the SWF (binary patching it) to drop any absolute url
contained in it !
Still, sometimes you DO want absolute urls in it. Take my mortage analisys
applet: it fetches rates from the bank site. Those rates will be updated
regularly, and I want to know !

> Saving SWF's and streams would be a big feature for Gnash -- that the
> Adobe plugin will never implement, because of its stance on DRM.  If
> we implemented this, a lot more people would switch to gnash -- or at
> least make it one of the available tools that they use some of the
> time.

I think a simple way to this would be to improve the File->Properties
menu so that for every character we add an 'URL' field, and that every
URI-looking string is made clickable (click to download).

--strk;