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Adobe To Open Real-Time Messaging Protocol
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jan 22, 2009 01:57 PM
from the after-jabber dept.
from the after-jabber dept.
synodinos writes "Adobe has
announced plans
to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol specification, which is
designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between
Adobe Flash Platform technologies. This move that has followed the opening of
the AMF spec has been
received with varying degrees of enthusiasm from the RIA community."
Related Stories
Submission: Abobe to Open Real-Time Messaging Protocol by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Your Rights Online: Adobe Uses DMCA On Protocol It Promised To Open 203 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Despite promising in January to open RTMP, Adobe has issued a DMCA take down request for an open source implementation of the protocol. The former SourceForge project page for rtmpdump now reports 'Invalid Project.' rtmpdump has been used in tools such as get_iplayer and get-flash-videos. Adobe is no stranger to the DMCA, having previously used it against Dmitry Sklyarov."
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Who are... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who are... (Score:5, Funny)
You've never heard of th Abobe Abrocat?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I looked it up, I use Evince for that. ;-)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who are... (Score:5, Funny)
..."Abobe"?!
It's not a misspelling. They're publishing the protocol for their warez versions. Hopefully it will be compatible with my Abobe Fotoshop and Akrobat.
Parent
Re:Who are... (Score:5, Funny)
Second cousin do President Odama.
Parent
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Re: (Score:2)
Lee Adama is President? Aparently I haven't been watching enough TV.
Re:Who are... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Who are... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Ignore this post... (Score:2)
(Posting to remove moderation.)
haXe (Score:3, Insightful)
Better late than never (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure there's any point to this, since the Red5 guys have already documented and implemented the protocol. And Wowza has a fantastic implementation, even though it's not open source. If nothing else, I'd like to see "Abobe" explains the fucked-up connection handshaking. "Send me any ol' 1500 bytes! Ok great, you're connected!"
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The block of garbage at the beginning of the handshake is, as far as I can figure out, a bandwidth test. The pattern is intended to be resistant to compression, so as to more accurately measure the real throughput of the client's connection.
Good news, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's good that some companies, like Adobe, are realizing it makes good business sense to open up these protocols. However let's also be aware that Adobe is perfectly willing to tighten the screws further in other areas when they feel like THAT makes business sense. Anyone who (like me) uses any of their CS3 or CS4 products has dealt with this.
Actually, I should say the first install of CS3 or CS4 goes pretty well, and activation is painless. But if you've got it at home and at work - which is perfectly acceptable according to their EULA - then have a computer suddenly die, prepare to invest a lot of time in trying to get the licensing sorted out just so you can do your work.
So my (long-winded) point is: Good for Adobe, but let's not give them too much credit for this.
Oh, cool. Now we can... (Score:3, Interesting)
...embed a chat room in a PDF and talk to anyone who has a copy of the same PDF open.
Re: (Score:2)
Its pretty moronic.
The chatroom should be in IRC or some other CHAT program that has been audited for security around CHATTING and any linkage should be done externally so that perhaps the PDF would load #pdfopen-word2008docs on irc.adobe.com in your IRC software, but embedding chat in a PDF is just silly.
Adobe - Kinda Like a Zenith (Score:2)
Re:Abobe? (Score:5, Funny)
Seems that someone confused their b with their d. It happens a lot with kids in preschool and kindergarten.
I knew that the Slashdot readership was getting younger, but I didn't realize HOW young!
Parent
Re:Abobe? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm dyslexic you intense clog!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
are they perhaps related ?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not good enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really.
First, it's got the same problem as any other proprietary application which opens specs -- there's only one implementation, and that implementation is proprietary. Most specs at least include a reference implementation.
More importantly, how long have the specs been open? Last I checked, they were only open for developing anything but a client/viewer.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
May 2008 was when Adobe relicensed it to permit development of viewers.
The big parts not in that spec are Spark (the video codec, which I don't think Adobe CAN open up, I'm not sure it's all theirs) and RTMP. Now it's just Spark.
The AC original poster is a moron.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Spark is just another name for H.263; you can get the spec from ITU. The undocumented proprietary codec is VP6, but ffmpeg has a reverse-engineered decoder.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah. Good news, then.
Even so, it's still got the same problem Silverlight does: The open source project has to catch up from the beginning (8 months of the spec being open vs 13 years of Flash), while the proprietary version marches ahead.
Not that it won't happen, but it will take time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And Nellymoser, one of the audio codecs.
It's good that they're opening up RTMP but they just released RTMFP/Stratus which looks like it's going to be very interesting. I want to create a system based on top of RTMFP but I don't want that system to be at the mercy of Adobe. Hopefully someone (like the guys behind Red5) will reverse engineer the Stratus interface.
Re:Not good enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
Search on google for: gnash clean room
What you will find is that Adobe made it difficult to legally work on an open source viewer, and that the specs that exist are either (1) leaked, and therefore it is questionable whether you can legally use them, or (2) from a clean room reverse engineering.
From: http://lwn.net/Articles/270056/ [lwn.net]
Gnash development has been done using a Clean room reverse engineering technique. By agreeing to the license for the Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash player, a developer gives up the right to develop a competing product.
From: http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30 [gnashdev.org]
Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.
Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.
From: http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/21 [openmedianow.org]
Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Adobe (Score:5, Interesting)
Which proves two things:
GP doesn't know WTF they're talking about... ...but they're right. PDF is an open standard, implemented by other vendors in a way that sucks, yet Acrobat still sucks.
In fact, Adobe has never really been known for performance. For another fun test, take a Flash video, download the FLV, and play it in any other player. Compare CPU usage.
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, there is a PDF format that is an ISO standard, but there are other PDF formats that Acrobat uses that aren't based on the ISO standard. I just opened Acrobat 9 to check, and the PDF that complies to the ISO standard isn't even the default.
If you click PDF/A, for example, from the drop down list, you are then presented with a dialog to supply some options. Certainly the ISO standards are well-supported, but they're not user friendly, and I highly doubt most people will go through the hoops to use
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Amen to this. This issue is the only reason I rip Hulu videos instead of just viewing them directly. The ads aren't that intrusive and ripping is less convenient than putting up with a few ads.
The problem is that on my HTPC (An older machine, Athlon XP 2800+), the Flash-based player is unable to play back video at full speed. mplayer, on the other hand, plays back ripped Hulu videos with plenty of CPU to spare.
Re: (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, what do you use for ripping Hulu videos? I've tried a couple of the Firefox extensions for downloading FLVs, but never had much luck.
My home system is on the old side, and although it can play DVDs, etc just fine with MPlayer, it often chokes on low-res flash videos.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
HTTPHeaders can be as useful as anything else.
It will list the full URL of every html, image, css, js, and flv requested from the server for the current page.
Simply copy the flv URL and paste stright back into the browser ... instant save-as prompt and your done :-)
Re: (Score:2)
s/hulu/iplayer for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%
I think FLV may be a container format, not codec. I think it uses VP6 for the actual video data, which was not designed for Flash.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just 64-bit Linux.
Flash 10 at least made it watchable, and fixed fullscreen, and quite a few other issues.
But try VLC vs Flash on any platform, you'll probably get the same results.
Re: (Score:2)
i still cant use proprietary ATI drivers (on kubuntu 8.04) and flash. I find it varies incredibly by player too.
youtube -> no problem
iplayer -> drops frames after about 30mins
other flash players (warez, etc) imediatly drop most of the frames.
but on the whole 64bit flash 10 has made things more bearable.
Re: (Score:2)
There's not really anything that inherently makes PDF slow, either. Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader happen to be pretty boated, but the format can be rendered fairly quickly.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Adobe (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Even with Foxit Reader viewing PDFs on Windows sucks compared to doing so on Linux or (especially!) Mac OS. You'd think by now that somebody would have come out with a Free-as-in-GPL viewing program that at least rivals Apple's Preview, but no...
(That reminds me, I need to see if Okular is stable and usable on KDE for Windows yet.)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
Preview.app on OS X, or Foxit Software's Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com] for Windows are both examples of lightweight PDF viewers that render pretty darn quick.
I'm sure there must be one for Linux, but hey, we all use the CLI there right? ;)
Security (Score:2)
Re:Adobe (Score:4, Informative)
I've written code that deals with PDF, both in terms of parsing and rendering it, as well as generating it. PDF is a great format. It certainly doesn't have the difficulties associated with, for instance, PostScript. Adobe's products might have poor performance but this is not due to the file format, which is NOT proprietary but actually quite well-documented.
I have no idea what sorts of crazy things happen inside Adobe's code. Suffice it to say, none of that is mandated by the PDF format.
Parent
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Hey, look, everyone, an Adobe employee has thoughts!
There, fixed that for you
Re:This is exactly what we need... (Score:5, Informative)
Um, RTMP is not a chat protocol. It is a protocol for stateful connections with multiplexed streams for downloading large amounts of media with real-time responses and quality of service requirements. It is what the Flash Player uses to download audio and video from servers. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Next time, look up the topic before spouting off.
Parent
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