Flex:Open Source

From Adobe Labs

Table of contents [showhide]

1 Adobe to Open Source Flex 1.1 Overview 1.2 License 1.3 Schedule 1.4 Currently Supported Platforms 1.5 More Information and FAQ 1.6 How can I ask more questions?

Adobe to Open Source Flex

On April 26, Adobe announced strategic plans to move the development of Flex to an open source model.

• Adobe to Open Source Flex (press release on Adobe.com)

Overview

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

License

The source code for the Flex SDK will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The MPL will allow full and free access to the source code, allowing developers to download, extend, and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler and framework classes. The Flex SDK will also be available under a commercial Adobe license. Offering a choice of licenses serves the needs of enterprise Flex customers and partners.

Mozilla Public License FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/mpl-faq.html

The annotated Mozilla Public License (explained in layman’s terms) http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1-annotated.html

Schedule

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By this summer, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by early 2008.

Currently Supported Platforms

• Windows XP, Server 2003, or Windows Vista Professional/Ultimate with Java 1.4 (Sun, IBM, or BEA) or 1.5 (Sun)
• Mac OS X 10.4.x, Java 1.5 (as shipped from Apple) on PowerPC and Intel processor
• Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 or 4, Suse 10, Java 1.4 (Sun, IBM, or BEA) or 1.5 (Sun)
• Solaris 9, 10, Java 1.4 or 1.5 (Sun) Compilers only

More Information and FAQ

This FAQ will provide all the details and hopefully answer all your questions.

• Flex Open Source FAQ
• David Wadhwani, VP of Flex Engineering and Ely Greenfield, Flex Architect discuss the Flex Open source announcement with Robert Scoble of PodTech.

How can I ask more questions?

You can participate in our discussion group.

Retrieved from "http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source"

Open Source YouTube

Everyone knows what YouTube or Google Video is. Most of them might use to waste a period of time in this kind of service. I'm one of them. I also wonder how it works. Technically, upload video service like YouTube and Google Video is very similar in underlying technology. In particular, all uploaded videos are automatically converted to Flash Video or FLV. The FLVs are stored in the file server. However, the FLVs is nevered shown directly on your browser. Instead, the FLVs are played inside Flash Video Player written in Flash itself. As a result, you can view a video immediately after getting only some part of the full-length video. In other words, Flash Video Player and FLV are the best couple for on-demand video streaming.
If you think it is too complex and too difficult to implement XXXTube by yourself, I will summarize everything you need to know and to have.
You need a Flash Video Player,
Uploading system,
Video conversion system,
Big storage and
Bandwidth
Let's see how to implement XXXTube as fast as possible. For the first requirement, you don't need to write Flash Video Player by yourself. There is an open source project namely Flash Video Player, latest verion is 2.4. The developer claimed that it has been used by YouTube and Blip. Next one, uploading system is very simple and easy. You can write uploading system in PHP in just an hour so you don't need to take care about this piece. The most difficult part of XXXTube is here in the third step, video conversion system. Why?
It should support video formats and codecs as many as possible or at least DivX, MPEG1, MPEG4, MOV, WMV, and 3GPP.
It might be as fast as possible. Otherwise, the uploaded videos may be waiting in the conversion queue. Nobody want this delay happened.
It should be robust and fully automatic. No interactive with other piece of tools.
Don't panic. Open source community is showing its useful, powerful, and awesome results. At least we have FFmpeg, MPlayer, MEncoder, and Transcode. These are more than enough to produce flash video from various video formats and codecs.
The simplest example is shown in official documentation of MPlayer site.

mencoder input.avi \
-o output.flv \
-of lavf \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=56 \
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=500:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 \
-srate 22050

Below is my flavorite.

mencoder input.avi \
-of lavf -lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames \
-ovc lavc
-lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=150 -ofps 15 \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=32 -srate 22050 \
-vf scale=320:-3 \
-o output.flv

One last problem is how to handle mass clients to produce flv just in time.

Reference (sugree's blog)