SWFPlayer

Standalone ShockWave Flash Player

Description

Swfplayer is a standalone program that allows you to view MacroMedia's ShockWave Flash files on your Amiga. More and more websites are now using this format to make their site up.

The Amiga Swfplayer is based the swfplayer originally written by Olivier Debon ([email protected]) as part of his Linux Flash Plugin for Netscape. Please take some time to visit his webpage, it has some interesting Flash information & links to several Flash sites: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/5084/flash.html

A PPC version of swfplayer was in the making but I run into big problems (it doesn't help that I don't own a PPC card...).

Known problems/bugs

The player is still under development and is probably quite buggy. It can currently handle many Flash Files (.swf) regardless of the file version (1 to 3), but part of the animations or other Flash functionalities may not be correct. Here is a list of the main features that the player does not handle

Rendering : shapes are not anti-aliased.
Sound is not fully supported.
Pixel Alpha Value not supported (3.0 only).
Morphing (3.0 only).
The Amiga version doesn't draw 'thick' lines.
.....

Please don't bother Oliver with bugs but report them directly to me so I can check if they're Amiga bugs introduced by myself.

Using SWFPlayer

The player can be launched directly from the command line, or added as an 'external viewer' to your web browser. From the command line swfplayer has some options:

FILE		The name of the .swf file to play.

PUBSCREEN		The name of the public screen to open on. e.g. IBrowse
PUBSCREEN		The name of the public screen to open on. e.g. IBrowse
MONOSOUND		Play all sounds in mono. Experimental option really.
MAXWIDTH		The maximum width window to use to play the animations. This is usefull to limit the size on lower resolution Amigas. Smaller window size play back faster too.
MAXHEIGHT		The same as MAXWIDTH but specifies the maximum height of the window.
ACTIVEPLAY		Only play animations while the window is active. When inactive swfplayer goes to sleep.

Some examples:

swfplayer amiga.swf
swfplayer amiga.swf PUBSCREEN ibrowse
swfplayer amiga.swf PUBSCREEN ibrowse MAXWIDTH 640 MAXHEIGHT 480

Adding swfplayer as an external viewer in your browser:

IBrowse 1.x. Under preferences -> General -> Ext. Viewer add the following:

Type: application/x-shockwave-flash
Mime:swf
Action: Ext. Viewer
Viewer: [path to swfplayer]/swfplayer
Arguments:%f

You may wish to include additional parameters in the arguments section. It may also be an idea to add a ">nil:" because swfplayer sometimes outputs debug information if it can't play the file 100%.

IBrowse 2.x. To be written.

AWeb

Voyager

History

23-Feb-1999 - First release.

22-Mar-1999 - Improved Amigaised interface, PUBSCREEN support, limited sound support. Line drawing is much faster, but doesn't handler 'thick' lines. OpenUrl support. If installed swfplayer will interact with your web browser. swfplayer now works on Kickstart 3.0. Released source code.

History

Oliver has release a newer version of his player. First the good news. This version it a lot faster. The bad news is that it only supports 16bit graphics. I'll see what I can do.

Downloads

Download swfplayer.lha

swfplayer 1.1

Download swfplayersrc.lha

swfplayer 1.1 source code

Download swfsamples.lha

example SWF files