2020-07-10T16:25:05+12:00 http://bluishcoder.co.nz/ Bluishcoder admin@bluishcoder.co.nz 2011-01-15T02:10:00+13:00 http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/01/15/webm-decoder-in-flash-using-alchemy <p><a href="http://unitzeroone.com/blog/">Ralph Hauwert</a> has been posting on twitter about work he's done on getting WebM decoding to work in Flash by compiling the <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/code/">libvpx</a> source code using Adobe's <a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/">Alchemy</a> technology.</p> <p>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 <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/UnitZeroOne/status/25710899566219264">originally tweeted</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Had a quickshot porting #WebM codec to Flash 10 using libvpx and alchemy. Surprisingly, got a preliminary version to work.</p></blockquote> <p>He <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/UnitZeroOne/status/25711897814769664">followed up with a post</a> 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 <a href="http://t.co/XGaiLYh">image</a> of a decoded frame.</p> <p>This is good stuff and it'll be worth following his <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/UnitZeroOne">twitter feed</a> if you're interested in a pure flash implementation of a WebM decoder.</p> <p>I've been interested in having decoders written in JavaScript, which I wrote about in my <a href="http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2009/06/05/reading-ogg-files-with-javascript.html">reading ogg files with JavaScript</a> post. Maybe something similar to the Flash/Alchemy approach could be done with <a href="http://code.google.com/p/emscripten/">emscripten</a>, an LLVM to JavaScript compiler, to get a WebM decoder in JavaScript.</p>