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Legalese

Legalese. Flash and Generator are acknowledged trademarks of Macromedia Corporation. Flash in the Pan. Manipulating SWF files with Perl Simon Wistow simon@twoshortplanks.com. Contents. About the SWF file format The need for manipulation tools The problems encountered Achievements

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Legalese

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  1. Legalese Flash and Generator are acknowledged trademarks of Macromedia Corporation

  2. Flash in the Pan Manipulating SWFfiles with Perl Simon Wistow simon@twoshortplanks.com

  3. Contents • About the SWF file format • The need for manipulation tools • The problems encountered • Achievements • Applications • The future • Conclusion

  4. About theSWF file format

  5. Flash? • A little bit of History • FutureSplash was originally created by FutureWave • FutureWave bought by MacroMedia,FutureSplash renamed Flash • current version is 5 • Flash file format (SWF) wasopen-sourced in 1998

  6. Flash? cont. • Vector animation format • shapes and lines • bitmaps (JPEGs, PNGs) • sounds (ADPCMs, MP3s) • These are known as objects • analogous to actors, scenery and soundtrack

  7. Flash?cont. • Keeping with the film analogy • SWF format is a script to describeand control the ‘actors’ • divided into frames • frames divided into tags • these define and control objects • 34 different tags, using 17 data-types

  8. Flash? cont. • Web Oriented • highly compressed • plug-in • pseudo-streaming

  9. Flash? cont. • Scriptable • control events, within movie • reactive, not truly dynamic

  10. The Idea • I needed • a tool for manipulating Flash files • a way of creating Flash files from scratch • some way of converting between formats • abstract representation

  11. The need for manipulation tools

  12. Why? • Can’t create totally dynamic content • prevents uses ondatabase applications • Because it’s complicated • it can’t be used within other applications, the facilities don’t exist • you can't do some thingswith the existing interface • Storing SWF binary is not always appropriate

  13. The Competition • Macromedia Generator • limited • modification not creation • expensive (very) • and you still need Flash Authoring tool • slow • resource intensive

  14. The Competitioncont. • Ming • enemy of flash • unfinished, only generates • not low level enough

  15. The Competitioncont. • Middlesoft SDK • limited to C++ on Windows • complicated • restrictive licensing • creation only

  16. Problems encountered

  17. Problems • Specification was wrong • required experimentation • incomplete, only dealt with version 3 • Very few knowledgeable people • NDAs • lack of community • Text representation • libswf very unstable • author unavailable

  18. Achievements

  19. SWFParser AbstractObject SWF Writer Achievements

  20. Applications

  21. Applications • Broadband access • richer interfaces • Database driven flash websites • e.g. animated weather maps • Batch generation • personalised invitations

  22. Applications cont. • Library for flash authoring application • Extraction of resources • images, sound, text • Conversion between other formats • save as SVG and MNG

  23. The future

  24. Future Work • Improve interface to the Object • simplify • functions for various effects • Update Libraries to Flash 5 • legalities of reverse engineering • More Input/Output filters • improve the ones already done

  25. Conclusions

  26. Conclusions • A lot has been achieved • but things still to do • Interest from industry and community • Many real-world applications • Development will continue

  27. Conclusions cont. • Structure is sound • Perl was appropriate • good support from user base • hundreds of pre-built libraries • performance issues

  28. Flash in the Pan Manipulating SWFfiles with Perl Simon Wistow simon@twoshortplanks.com

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