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The "desiccated formats" thing reminds me of how a lot of old Flash content was converted to video. Of course, the original files still work, but they relied o
by kmeisthax 5y ago
The "desiccated formats" thing reminds me of how a lot of old Flash content was converted to video.
Of course, the original files still work, but they relied on a proprietary player technology. Adobe would later kill said player technology in the name of security (really, it was a huge money sink for them). Converting those files to video was the best option.
The problem is that... well, first, most Flash content was interactive. So video doesn't help with those files. Second problem is that Adobe never provided a competent video export tool. You could render Flash to video formats... if your animation had no nested movie clips, no ActionScript, and your computer had no background tasks running. The export was extremely finicky and was almost like a bad screencap of the Player instead of a properly genlocked output.
Of course, we have Swivel for that, and Ruffle for interactive movies is coming along pretty nicely. However, there's still a root cause for all of this - Adobe owning the whole platform and thus having the ability to kill it with timebombs and browser support.
If you're willing to throw any concept of copyright out the window, you can just download Flashpoint and get working Players along with pretty much all of the content you'd ever need for them pre-curated (which is actually useful, as playing arbitrary movies off the Internet in the player today is absolutely not a thing you should do).
Much of the fallacies involved in this article boil down to "digital formats are proprietary and ever-changing". This is something that needs to change, through more reverse-engineering and documentation... and blatant copyright violation if necessary.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoThe Flash thing was so unnecessary. Adobe could have made a WebAssembly version of Flash Player.
- kmeisthax 5y agoYes, but that would have required Adobe invest time and money into a platform they were going to kill off. Adobe's official guidance was to "convert" your Flash content to HTML5. They added CreateJS support in 2013 and you could export movies to this format. Aside from the fact that it also rendered everything in a PNG spritesheet instead of vectors (because SVG+SMIL wasn't an option!?), there was zero support for existing ActionScript APIs or content. You would have to rewrite everything in 2013-era JavaScript (which is even more difficult due to the fact that AS3 adopted a lot of preliminary web APIs that were ultimately never adopted into browsers, like ES4, E4X, and so on). In their eyes, that was it. Who cares about old Flash content? We should just rewrite all of it. In Adobe's defense the Player was a huge money sink at this point, and they had no clue how to actually pay for any of it. The last big upgrade they planned was AS4, and their idea of how to pay for it was to start charging people for using specific Player features in certain combinations. When Flash developers balked about this (because the monetization model Flash used to rely on was that you bought access to the Player with your Flash Pro license) Adobe decided to shitcan future Player features altogether and just put the whole project on maintenance mode. Actually, now that I think about it, that isn't really a good defense of Adobe. The company is an absolutely terrible steward of it's own software.
- EricE 5y agoMacromedia Flash. Oh the days. And as you were recounting the above I suddenly saw Adobe in the Symantec/Computer Associates frame and realized Adobe has been almost as "successful" at those companies at absorbing and killing useful software for really no reason than those publishers competed with them, reducing overall value to the ecosystem. They sucked up Aldus killing Pagemaker, the aforementioned Macromedia and at least one other major publisher from the 90's that I feel I should remember but can't off the top of my head. Ugh. I'm still pissed at Symantec for what they did to PC Tools...