Topic: Pure Flash player for .mod, .mid, .ogg and vorbis

ogg+vorbis http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/
midi http://www.tan66.cn/new-midas3-sample-for-flashplayer10/
.mod http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/flashmodplayer/modplayer.html

Some of them are written in HaXe

I don't know about mod or midi, but Ogg and Vorbis were created specifically to counter proprietary formats like AVI and MP3. Their use via a proprietary plugin such as Flash is completely nonsensical except in an instance of complete laziness. Additionally, in the free software world, making a media file play and manipulating it is dead simple compared to what people tend to do for Windows Media Player and Quicktime.

On the other hand, Apple and Microsoft do not seem interested in supporting any of the Ogg formats (Vorbis, Theora, Speex, FLAC, Dirac are those I've seen mentioned, though there are others). Using Flash for supporting these in those browsers if there is no QuickTime/DirectShow OGG support installed cannot be a bad thing, can it? Better than asking people to download and install something on their local system, I think.

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quote:

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Using Flash for supporting these in those browsers if there is no QuickTime/DirectShow OGG support installed cannot be a bad thing, can it?

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If you do not consider undoing the entire point of the creation of these formats a bad thing, I suppose not.

quote:

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Better than asking people to download and install something on their local system, I think.

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...like Flash?

@reisio

wait...... You don't have flash installed on your browser? WOW!

This is my first time posting a topic here, I think this place is about browser demos, right? And audio is a missing part of javascript demoscene.

So just imagine javascript generated dynamic music using .mod + flash ! HOHO~~ It will run on 90% of computers.

Thanks for sharing these.

The DHTML/Javascript category of the Asylum is about all things DHTML, not just browser demos. But of course that includes such things.

reisio: Until HTML5 Flash was the only way reliable way to get sound, now we can simply use it as a fallback ... except for MOD and similar formats.

Resio: In the case of no native ogg support, I don't see why playing the ogg file using Flash instead of through a media player plugin, through Java or through SilverLight is worse choice than not playing it at all, if the user wants to play it. And in difference to the case of installing a media player plugin or a media codec for an existing media player plugin, an swf played by Flash runs in a low privilege sandbox that makes it a smaller risk for the user than downloading and installing a local application, especially since many installers require admin rights. Additionally users are less likely to download things at all compared to just visiting a site that uses Flash, so you as publisher will probably get your audio out to a bigger portion of the visitors this way compared to if you didn't offer the Flash solution at all.

And the ogg file does not become any less of an open format file just because you change the player, does it? If you haven't noticed, the factor that has kept Ogg from becoming a frequent format to see online is likely that players for it aren't as common or well spread as players for MP3, WMA or even RA. It already is a frequent format elsewhere - it's the most common audio format used in PC games and on the rise on games consoles, despite sometimes competing with hardware decoders for competing formats.

In fact, this adding an ogg player through Flash just works to open it even more by allowing yet another way of getting the capability to actually play the ogg files out to users that care nothing at all what format the audio is in, as long as it works, which would be the vast majority of users.

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All you'd be doing is supporting Flash, not Ogg.

Really? You'd be supporting them both, I'd say. Anyway, you first try playing it natively in an audio element. That works fine in Opera and Mozilla. Then you fallback to a series of oject elements, first with the raw file to catch users that have a plugin with support for that media type, then those that have VLC plugin, then WMP with the Ogg DirectShow filter, Quicktime with the right codec installed, and finally a Flash/Java/SilverLight catch-all which both implements a player and actually plays the file. Most would probably cut out the middle object elements and go with an audio element falling back to a single object element with the Flash Ogg player.

And you would definitely be supporting Ogg over the competitors since the most reliable way of getting audio on the web today is Flash anyway, but that is typically MP3 (or AAC, since Flash 9 supports it as part of it's MPEG4 support) instead of Ogg at the moment. It's not a choice of Ogg versus Flash, it's a choice of Ogg or MP3, both played through Flash, with the possibility to play natively in the browser too. (Safari and Internet Explorer will support whatever Quicktime and DirectShow supports, respectively, so those will play MP3 and either AAC or WMA natively. Will Mozilla and Opera play MP3 natively? I haven't read up on that.)

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Fallback would certainly be nicer, at least.

If most of the standard Flash sound API (onload, bytesloaded/total, etc.) can be supported, I'd be interested in adding support for Ogg etc. to my project (SoundManager 2), the point of which is to expose sound functionality to Javascript via flash behind the scenes.

Given with Flash 10 you can manipulate and feed sound to the sound card directly, it should (theoretically) be a matter of people writing or porting decoders in/to AS3 to allow a large portion of browsers to play other audio formats without requiring an install.

I'm not a huge Flash fan, but it has been increasingly useful for certain troublesome web things - batch uploading of files, playing audio and video.

Yeah. It's our own fault, and of course it's not fundamentally terrible, I just wish it weren't a closed source party, and that it were better coded.