Comments on: Pachyderm Asset Transformation Dilemma

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

King suggested using ming as an alternative – and writing our own mini-jGenerator that just creates the .swf wrapper (and possibly inserts the tombstone). That idea would be a perfect middle ground. I just downloaded Ming, but haven’t had much luck getting it to build just yet. I’ll try some more after The Boyâ„¢ goes to sleep tonight…

By: King Chung Huang

King Chung Huang — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Actually, it was Tim (the most recent one) that suggested ming. I started reading the Flash File Format specification this afternoon to get an idea of what it would take to do the one little thing that we need. I’ve already learned how to read the first eight bytes of a Flash file! Now, I just need to brush up on my bit-swizzling skills…

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Ah. Tim #3

Ming looks like it should do the trick nicely – we may even get to do tombstones, if we can figure out how to set field values… I’ll give it some more energy tonight.

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Well, I got Ming to compile – had to manually download and compile libungif and libpng first. After that, I followed these handy instructions to get ming compiled and installed.

Looks like the java wrapper for ming is either borked or abandoned – won’t compile because of silly invalid import statements. Not sure it makes sense to do the trivial fix to get that to compile, since that may be a sign of further stagnation in the java wrappers (sound familiar )

I guess our best bet would be to use the C api via JNI or runtime.exec() or something (assuming that’s possible).

On the plus side, it sounds like Ming can create any kind of .swf that Flash MX can – including scripting, transitions, and video. Could be a very handy replacement for jGenerator if we can figure this one out.