19 June 2006

Flashiness Beats Reality

Bad news according to this story: Flash has jumped ahead of Real to become the number 2 video format (after Microsoft's Windows Media). The rise of Flash is particularly tiresome given that there are good open alternatives like Theora and OpenLaszlo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually OpenLaszlo compiles to Flash (swf) format, so the FlashPlayer is used to playback media in OpenLaszlo applications.

OpenLaszlo will also soon be compilable to DHTML, but since browsers don't have native media playback capabilities, you'll need to have some kind of plug-in (for example, Flash!) in order to run OL apps in DHTML.

I believe that there is at least one project to build an open source player for swf format media, but OpenLaszlo is not part of that effort.

Glyn Moody said...

OK, thanks for the information. It was the DHTML that I was thinking of. I think this already works for animations, but presumably not videos.