So about a month ago Federico blogged a Youtube link again. That made me wonder about Free Flash decoders and I had a look around. In the end I started hacking on David's Swfdec, since it has all the goodies: Cairo for beautiful Graphics, GStreamer for sound, David's excellent code (the SWF parsing code is awesome) and of course it was written in Gnome C.

Long story short: I haven't had this much fun in hacking for ages. I think I haven't done much else in the past month but hacked on Swfdec and watched lots of stupid Flash movies lots of times.

So what's the current state? It's still very far from finished since Flash is huge. It's a graphics framework (think GDK) with a scripting engine (think Javascript). But if you're adventurous, bored or both, feel free to check out the sources from git://people.freedesktop.org/~company/git/swfdec and play with them. They might even play back some weird flash file. For now I'll continue to make FLash files work one by one. Next stop: South Park.

PS: Before someone asks: Gnash is low quality, written in C++ with Boost, requires Copyright assignment, svn doesn't even compile and it does less than my current Swfdec, so I didn't hack on it.