readme

Swfdec still is development software, but has also followed a rigid no-crashes-allowed policy. I b

Swfdec is a decoder/renderer for Macromedia Flash animations. The decoding and 
rendering engine is provided in a library that can be used by other 
applications.  

The library is still in heavy development. The intended audience are developers
or people using it for pretested Flash animations (think embedded here). If you
use it on unknown content, expect it to have issues and don't be surprised if 
it crashes. If you encounter such a crash however, make sure to file a bug 
immediately.

Swfdec contains some applications for testing and debugging the library. These 
are availabole in the player/ and test/ directory. They are not installed. The
applications in the player/ directory require GTK and ALSO to build, while the
library does not. So if you are packaging Swfdec, you probably do not want to 
make it depend on GTK or ALSA.

The test/ directory contains subdirectories that run automated tests with the 
provided SWF files in the directory. See the README files in those directories
for details on how to run or add these tests.

If you want to playing Flash files in your web browser, you need a browser 
plugin additional to this library. The plugins are shipped in seperate 
packages, like swfdec-mozilla. You can get them at the same location as swfdec.


Locations:

   The Swfdec homepage is at http://swfdec.freedesktop.org
   A bugtracker can be found at https://bugzilla.freedesktop.org
   A mailing list is available at [e-mail]
     For information about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list see 
     http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/swfdec
   The development source code is kept in git. The following command gets it:
     git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/swfdec


Maintainers:

   see the file MAINTAINERS


Limitations:

 - A few rare object types are not handled at all. They are ignored.

 - SWF files that use Flash generally heavily depend on ActionScript features.
   Support for ActionScript is currently incomplete. Unsupported scripts are
   skipped.

 - If any known unsupported behaviour is encountered, Swfdec will print a 
   notice to stderr and try to interpret the file nonetheless. If you 
   encounter a file with only some unsupported things, it may be a good idea
   to open a feature request bug and provide the file. The developers are
   always interested in files that motivate them to do little steps.


Dependencies:

  cairo (>= 1.2.0 - >= 1.4.0 recommended)
  liboil (>= 0.3.6)
  Pangocairo (aka Pango with cairo support)
  zlib (>= 1.1.4)

  FFMpeg (>= 0.4.8 - optional, required for various audio and video formats)
  MAD (>= 0.15.1b - optional, required for MP3 audio format support)

  GTK+ (>= 2.0 - optional)
  ALSA (>= 1.0 - optional)