Thanks.

> Do you have a specific complaint about the Win32 binaries that I could try to address?

IIRC Gnash is "Alpha" and Alpha usually isn't perfect ;-)

1. Somewhat slow, _some_ SWF's play suspiciously (=extremely) slowly (general know issue ?)
2. Sound is sometimes broken (general know issue ?)
3. They are heavily bloated (+ overfeatured ?)
4. Win32 package is underdocumented, there is for example no list of executables revealing purpose of them

While 1. and 2. might improve "automatically" in 0.8.3 soon, the point 3. is most likely most relevant to me ... that's why I suggested the "Gnash-Lite" ;-)

Please try to make / keep the compatibility of Win32 Gnash releases high (not Vista-only):
- Compatibility options in the compiler, no unnecessary problematic external DLL's (MSVCxx80xx, MSVCxx90xx)
- Supporting SDL and BMP/PNG+WAV for output
- Don't request what isn't absolutely needed, import GUI + sound stuff conditionally via LoadLibrary+GetProcAddress (MPLAYER seems to do so), minimize usage of high-level GUI API (like QEMU and MPLAYER do), pure console for BMP/PNG+WAV output ?



 

Hi

The 0.8.2 Win32 executables are considerably better (not perfect still) than previous versions. :-)

Some sugg's:

Add new output "drivers" for video and audio:
- WAV for audio - don't connect to any sound system then
- BMP or PNG for video (bunch of frames) - thus no GUI involved then, don't connect to any GUI system, pure console
the very same way as MPLAYER already does :-)
This way SWF could be "converted" into an "ordinary" movie, for example OGG Theora+Vorbis.

Create a "Gnash-Lite" version:
- Only play SWF files from local storage media, no network, no FLV/Tube/FFMPEG stuff, no browser stuff
- Only "raw" video (+audio) output via SDL or similar or WAV+BMP/PNG, no GUI around, like MPLAYER and QEMU do

Thanks for your attention.