2011-01-15
WebM Decoder in Flash using Alchemy
Ralph Hauwert has been posting on twitter about work he's done on getting WebM decoding to work in Flash by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe's Alchemy technology.
Alchemy is a research project that allows compilation of C and C++ libraries into code that runs on the ActionScript virtual machine used by Flash. Ralph originally tweeted:
Had a quickshot porting #WebM codec to Flash 10 using libvpx and alchemy. Surprisingly, got a preliminary version to work.
He followed up with a post saying the intial performance of a 1920x1080 VP8 video with no audio was decoding to YUV at about 1.5 frames per second. He provides an image of a decoded frame.
This is good stuff and it'll be worth following his twitter feed if you're interested in a pure flash implementation of a WebM decoder.
I've been interested in having decoders written in JavaScript, which I wrote about in my reading ogg files with JavaScript post. Maybe something similar to the Flash/Alchemy approach could be done with emscripten, an LLVM to JavaScript compiler, to get a WebM decoder in JavaScript.
