The Adobe Flash Player is freeware
software for viewing multimedia, executing rich Internet applications, and
streaming video and audio, content created on the Adobe Flash platform
Flash Player supports vector and
raster graphics, 3D graphics, an embedded scripting language called
ActionScript executed in ActionScript Virtual Machine, and streaming of video
and audio
Flash Player has a wide user
base, with over 90% penetration on internet connected personal computers, and
is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into web pages.
Adobe Systems, the developer of Adobe Flash Player, states that more than 400
million of total more than 1 billion connected desktops update to the new
version of Flash Player within six weeks of release.
Flash Player includes native support for many different data formats :
Ø XML:
Flash Player has included native support for XML parsing and generation since
version 8. XML data is held in memory as an XML Document Object Model, and can
be manipulated using ActionScript. ActionScript 3 also supports ECMA Script for
XML (E4X), which allows XML data to be manipulated more easily.
Ø JSON:
Flash Player 11 includes native support for importing and exporting data in the
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, which allows interoperability with
web services and JavaScript programs.
Ø AMF:
Flash Player allows cookies to be stored on users computers, in the form of
Local Shared Objects, the Flash equivalent to browser cookies. Flash Player can
also natively read and write files in the Action Message Format, the default
data format for Local Shared Objects. Since the AMF format specification is
published, data can be transferred to and from Flash applications using AMF
datasets instead of JSON or XML, reducing the need for parsing and validating
such data.
Ø SWF: The
specification for the SWF file format was published by Adobe, enabling the
development of the SWX Format project, which utilized the SWF file format and
AMF as a means for Flash applications to exchange data with server side
applications. The SWX system stores data as standard SWF bytecode which is
automatically interpreted by Flash Player. Another open-source project, SWXml
allows Flash applications to load XML files as native ActionScript objects
without any client-side XML parsing, by converting XML files to SWF/AMF on the
server
Ø Flash
Player is primarily a graphics and multimedia platform, and has supported
raster graphics and vector graphics since its earliest version. It supports the
following different multimedia formats which it can natively decode and
playback.
Ø MP3:
Support for decoding and playback of streaming MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3)
audio was introduced in Flash Player 4. MP3 files can be accessed and played
back from a server via HTTP, or embedded inside an SWF file, which is also a
streaming format.
Ø FLV:
Support for decoding and playing back video and audio inside Flash Video (FLV
and F4V) files, a format developed by Adobe Systems and Macromedia. Flash Video
is only a container format and supports multiple different video codecs, such
as Sorenson Spark, VP6 and more recently H.264. Flash Player uses hardware
acceleration to display video where present, using technologies such as DirectX
Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so. Flash Video is used by Youtube, Hulu,
yahoo! Video, BBC Online and other news providers. FLV files can be played back
from a server using HTTP progessive download, and can also be embedded inside
an SWF file. Flash Video can also be streamed via RTMP using the Adobe Flash
Media Server or other such server-side software.
Ø PNG:
Support for decoding and rendering Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images, in
both its 24-bit (opaque) and 32-bit (semi-transparent) variants. Flash Player
11 can also encode a PNG bitmap via ActionScript.
Ø JPEG:
Support for decoding and rendering compressed JPEG images. Flash Player 10
added support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard developed
by Microsoft Corporation, which results
in better compression and quality than JPEG. JPEG-XR enables lossy and lossless
compression with or without alpha channel transparency. Flash Player 11 can
also encode a JPEG or JPEG-XR bitmap via ActionScript.
Ø GIF:
Support for decoding and rendering compressed Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)
images, in its single-frame variants only. Loading a multi-frame GIF will
display only the first image frame.
