Topic: Flash 7?

I'm reading that widgets on chumby are Flash 7.  But Flash 7 doesn't support GIF, PNG, or even progressive JPEGs, making building widgets far harder than Flash 8.

Is Flash 7 correct?  Is it set in stone?

Thanks,

Don

Re: Flash 7?

I thought it was using Flashlite as a player. So whatever you develop in the movie should just be able to run in flashlite. Right?

Re: Flash 7?

chumby is running FlashLite 2.0, which is effectively Flash 7 compatible (with some exceptions).  We will be upgrading to FlashLite 2.1 soon.  You can read about FlashLite here - http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

Re: Flash 7?

Yes, right now, we have the same limitations as the standard Flash 7 player with regard to image media.

Even more so, we do not support Flash Video, meaning no Sorenson or On2 video - the processor simply isn't capable of decoding and playing back video encoded with those codecs.

We are looking into expanding some of the media types.

Re: Flash 7?

Duane wrote:

Yes, right now, we have the same limitations as the standard Flash 7 player with regard to image media.

Even more so, we do not support Flash Video, meaning no Sorenson or On2 video - the processor simply isn't capable of decoding and playing back video encoded with those codecs.

We are looking into expanding some of the media types.

Thanks for the info.  For what it's worth, we're most interested in progressive JPEGs. 

If I can get my hands on a chumby, we'll just do on-the-fly conversion server-side for the time being, but native support would be awesome.

Don

Re: Flash 7?

You may want to do server-side processing anyway - the JPEG decoder is not the same one as in the Flash 7 - for performance reasons, it only does "nearest-neighbor" sampling, much like the normal player's "medium" quality. Therefore, you want to avoid scaling as much as possible - you want to preprocess the images to be the correct size.  While you're at it, you might as well make them non-progressive.

The chumby is limited in memory - you really don't want to be downloading 1024x768 jpegs and just end up displaying them at 320x240.

Effectively, a movie is given about 4MB to live within - that has to hold the entire SWF and any memory it needs a runtime, including downloaded movies and images.

Re: Flash 7?

Duane wrote:

You may want to do server-side processing anyway - the JPEG decoder is not the same one as in the Flash 7 - for performance reasons, it only does "nearest-neighbor" sampling, much like the normal player's "medium" quality. Therefore, you want to avoid scaling as much as possible - you want to preprocess the images to be the correct size.  While you're at it, you might as well make them non-progressive.

The chumby is limited in memory - you really don't want to be downloading 1024x768 jpegs and just end up displaying them at 320x240.

Effectively, a movie is given about 4MB to live within - that has to hold the entire SWF and any memory it needs a runtime, including downloaded movies and images.

Yeah, I was already planning on this.  SmugMug supports rendering to specific pixel sizes. 
http://twins.smugmug.com/photos/86898518-320x240.jpg
http://twins.smugmug.com/photos/86898518-320x240.jpg
vs http://twins.smugmug.com/photos/86898518-640x480.jpg
http://twins.smugmug.com/photos/86898518-640x480.jpg

But we send the newly created image as progressive, so I may have to tweak that to allow a non-progressive identifier too.

Thanks for the info.

Don

Re: Flash 7?

would the chumby flash player be able to load simple flash websites? that would be something interesting for my site: a page that runs on chumby, with all the videos. itd be something i would seriously consider, but its whether chumby would be able to handle it.

my site isnt very cpu intensive as it is tongue check it out. nophus.com

need upload space for the forums or a chumby blog? right here then
http://www.nophus.com/useru
username is chumby
password is chumby