Adobe Continues Flash Platform Move Towards Openness and Transparency

Huge announcements from Adobe on the Flash Platform front as detailed by Ryan Stuart. Here are the highlights:

• SWF Format licensing restrictions completely removed
• Flash video (flv / h.264) licensing restrictions completely removed and formats are documented
• No more licensing fees for Flash Player and AIR on mobile devices. This means manufacturers won’t have to shell out if they want Flash on their phone / pda.
• Publication of device porting layer APIs for Flash Player. Allows companies / developers to be proactive in porting Flash Player to their device or software platform

I’ve been critical of Adobe in the past with regard to their tardy format documentation and restrictive licensing of the SWF format, but this response totally exceeds my expectations. I’m blown away by the open sourcing of Tamarin, Flex SDK and now the removal of licensing restrictions and full documentation of the formats.

I’m also very excited about the elimination of the device licensing fees and porting APIs — I want to see Flash in my fridge, in my car and on my iPhone (Apple help these folks out damnit).

I am a little bummed that Adobe is moving forward with its plan to use ‘custom’ file extensions (i.e. .f4v) for its MPEG-4 container files. The only reasons I can see for this are that lots of applications depend on file extension in order to import / playback files. For instance, audiobook applications expect .m4b / .f4b files and don’t know what to do with a video file, or want to do something different with video files, but don’t want to parse the container atoms. I can unequivocally say multiple extensions are extremely confusing. I’ve had 4 different conversations with folks at work just this week trying to explain what a MPEG-4 container is and what the various different extension signify. However, this point is minor compared to the continued openness of Adobe.

You can get more detailed developer info here on the Adobe site.