Re: [Gnash-dev] using gnash plugin to playing embedded flash video

[Torsten Schlabach]

Hi Nevo!

[strk wrote:]
> You cannot skip to compute it.

I am actually looking at the same problem you are looking at. My site
which keeps me up at night in that case is http://rtl-now.de/. To be
honest, my ultimate goal is to see the video, if possible, in my
favorite player. I don't care for anything else they put around it.

Well, unfortunately, they do ...

This starts with the fact that (on that particular site) you are
required to watch one commercial prior to the actual video starting.
Interesting enough, you have to sit through the commercial only the
first time you watch each video.

IMO there is a popular misconceptions to free yourself of:

The flash movie you see on a site with the video embedded is not just a
generic video player (as the Windows Media or Real Player browser
plugins are bascially) which receive a playlist from somewhere, then
goes for it and play it.

A flash movie (IMO the term is again a bit misleading) should rather be
considered a binary executable which runs in a VM which is comparable in
the complexity of application logic it supports to a full blown Java VM.

Dependent on what ideas the developer of a flash based video site had,
the ActionScript code can be as simple as one statement which says "play
this URL, please" or it can do whatever magic to load and parse some XML
config from the net, create an authenticated session on the video
server, etc. The actual URL which is being played does not even have to
be anywhere inside the .swf file at all, but it may be loaded
dynamically from the net.

Having said that: Even if you found the URL which is being played, there
is no guarantee that you can just call up that URL from any client and
it will play at all. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't.

The only way to make this work in 99,9% of all cases will unfortunately
indeed by to implement all unimplemented tags which you come across. I
am looking at this as well currently as my time permits.

Re development version, please also check this:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2009-02/msg00070.html

What I mean is the AVM2 branch. I have no idea yet how this might be
different from the "normal" development version (trunk) but what I found
is: It has different (not less, but different) unimplemented warnings in
my case.

I hope I'll find the time to hack the code a bit. I already looked at
libcore/vm for that; I am lacking some AS3 basics, unfortunately.

Regards,
Torsten


Nevo schrieb:
> hi!
> Im recently using gnash (latest stable) as my FF flash plugin to play
> embedded flash video ,and I knew that it would probably not work for all
> video site ,but it is indeed open source ,free to read and learn. I did
> try youtube, which worked quite well for part of its videos . But not
> work for "tudou.com",something like "UNIMPLEMENTED: xxxxxx" or "ERROR:
> Parsing exception: premature end of tag" was thrown out, so player
> didn't proceed to connect to the actually video.
> Actually, my question here is not how to solve those kind of errors or
> unimplements right away, instead, is that is there any general or
> standard procedure to follow to bypass those runtime error during
> interpreting of SWF player ActionScripts and directly construct the url
> for the real flash video file and do request for the file . The question
> can be simply put as how flash plugin works to construct the real flash
> video url on the fly ? I mean how the flash plugin is able to locate the
> final real flash video file if the input url is actually a
> representation for a html page ? Is there any specification or standard
> for that ,or it is just controlled completely by ActionScripts that we
> cannot skip to compute the real video url?
> Hope my question is described to be understandable. If anyone has
> different opinion or any suggest, I would much appreciate that. Thanks
> for your help.
> 
> Nevo
> Best Regards
> 
> 
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