Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu We seem to agree on the principles, and we can recruit for each of the alternatives. -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 9:16 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hal Murray wrote: I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser. Am I missing something? Tamarin is a small fraction of the code needed to do a flash VM. Even starting with Tamarin you'd have many years of development. All Tamarin is is an ActionScript interpreter, SWF is much more complex than that. So where is Gnash? What can we look forward to in the next release? What help do you need? - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Gnash supports all the proprietary codecs, the issue is that the OLPC can't ship Gnash enable for these codecs due to US patent law. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. Usually this is the fastest way to get something working with Gnash. If the developer test with Gnash, it's often a tiny bit of additional work. The problem is nobody tests with Gnash but a few free software developers... I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. The OLPC already bundles Gnash with the XO. The issues are often one of missing codecs for multimedia support, and completeness. While Gnash handle SWF v7 reasonably well, much newer content is coming out in SWF v8 and v9, which we're still working on. As Gnash uses ffmpeg and gstreamer, it can actually handle any supported video format, including the new high quality YouTube one (H.264), as well as Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and Dirac. For the XO, I'd think one would want to be using Theora or Vorbis instead of something proprietary. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: So where is Gnash? What can we look forward to in the next release? The latest release was about 2 weeks ago. :-) We put snapshot builds up on http://www.getgnash.org and we recently got buildbot up and running, those builds currently go in http://www.gnashdev.org/buildbot. What help do you need? Seriously ? :-) We need more resources for the Gnash project. We are a tiny handful of people working hard on doing a clean room SWF player. The few of us work all day, every day on Gnash More people volunteering to work on Gnash, funding help, test cases would all help us achieve compatibility with SWF v9 in a reasonable amount of time. Most people, and this includes the majority of OLPC users, just go Gnash doesn't work or Gnash will never be complete, and just install the Adobe player as the easy path to what they're used to. If people were willing to work with us on actually tracking down what the bugs are so we can fix them, or working on producing SWF content that has been tested with Gnash, we'd get more accomplished. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin Wrote: That might be the quickest strategy, but I don't agree that it is the best. * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Sugar needs more developers, the XS needs more developers and resources, this project as a whole needs a lot more resources. There are a lot of awesome flash-based modules for magnetism, electricity, math, and basic science. Flash is pervasive in educational courseware development. We shouldn't make kids wait until we come up with a completely free alternative to Flash. One aspect of this project is that kids can discover things on their own. If we have very limited flash support we are limiting what kids can discover to works that we have transcoded or Gnash fully supports. OLPC can't bundle flash into their images but they can make it significantly easier for deployment teams to add it as an .xo bundle just as we currently add custom activity bundles. I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. But we have pilots running now and kids that want to learn science, mathematics, English, etc. Let's not make them wait. Bryan Kathmandu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
I agree that the long-term strategy should be to support Gnash and/or get Adobe to open up their Flash player. I thought Adobe already opened up. From: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/061206.html Wednesday, December 6, 2006 The Adobe Flash Player is almost universally available on desktop computers, yet many people are not even aware of its existence or of its capabilities. It is a client application that is accessible within most web browsers and features support for vector and raster graphics, audio and video streaming and a scripting language; ActionScript. The scripting language is executed by a virtual machine (VM), the internals of which, will be the focus of this talk. I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser. Am I missing something? My memory from the talk is that ActionScript == ECMAScript == Javascript. Flash sends a compiled version of the script so it's obfuscated enough that you can't easily see what it is doing. Here is Mozilla's version of the press release: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html SAN FRANCISCO -- November 7, 2006 -- Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript^(TM) Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications. The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla's free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Seth Woodworth Wrote: Holy Crap! That's amazing. We need this *on* the laptops. Curse you flash! Does it work alright in gnash? Or should we transcode it? There are a lot of great education activities done in Flash and their # will only increase simply because it is very easy to develop animations using flash. Check out www.eshikshaindia.in for more great learning animations. Those did not work w/ Gnash when I tried it last month. I have a lot of respect for what the Gnash guys have done but the best strategy would be to make it easy for deployment teams to bundle flash w/ the XO. So many Internet sites depend on it. From my understanding of the Adobe license terms, you can distribute Flash w/in an intranet, which I judge to mean I can install it on the XO's for Nepal's pilot schools. One thing is definitely clear, you cannot bundle flash into an xo image available on the internet. However, I believe that I can make the flash plugin to a school intranet via the XS and still conform to the Adobe license. AFAIK the flash plugin only requires one file to be installed as far as I can tell libflashplayer.so The easiest way technically to do this would be to put in a symlink from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /home/olpc/mozilla/plugins and then modify the customization key script to look for flash and other plugins and copy them to the home/.../plugins folder Bryan Kathmandu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
