
Swfdec is a decoder/renderer for Macromedia Flash animations. The decoding and 
rendering engine is provided in a library that can be used by other 
applications.  

An additional library named swfdec-gtk is provided for easy integration of
Swfdec into Gtk applications. This library is what developers most likely want 
to target their applications at. Building this library can be disabled.

Swfdec is intended to be used as a replacement for the default Flash player.
While it is not yet a 100% complete replacement, a big focus is on stability
and security. So it is deemed to be suitable for use in production 
applications.

The library however is still in heavy development. Because of that, the 
Programming interface will change between major versions. No guarantees are 
made about the API. However, during stable release cycles, the API and ABI are 
guaranteed to stay stable.

Swfdec contains some applications for testing and debugging the library. These 
are available in the player/, test/ and tools/ directories. They are not 
installed. Most of them require the swfdec-gtk library.

The test/ directory contains subdirectories that run automated tests with the 
provided SWF files in the directory. See the README files in those directories
for details on how to run or add these tests.

If you want to playing Flash files in your web browser, you need a browser 
plugin additional to this library. The plugins are shipped in separate 
packages, like swfdec-mozilla. You can get them at the same location as swfdec.


Locations:

   The Swfdec homepage is at http://swfdec.freedesktop.org
   A bugtracker can be found at https://bugzilla.freedesktop.org
   A mailing list is available at swfdec@lists.freedesktop.org
     For information about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list see 
     http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/swfdec
   The development source code is kept in git. The following command gets it:
     git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/swfdec


Maintainers:

   see the file MAINTAINERS


Limitations:

 - A few rare object types are not handled at all. They are ignored.

 - SWF files that use Flash generally heavily depend on ActionScript.
   Support for ActionScript is currently incomplete. Unsupported functions in
   scripts are skipped.

 - If any known unsupported behaviour is encountered, Swfdec will print a 
   notice to stderr and try to interpret the file nonetheless. If you 
   encounter a file with only some unsupported things, it may be a good idea
   to open a feature request bug and provide the file. The developers are
   always interested in files that motivate them to do little steps.


Dependencies:

  cairo (>= 1.2.0 - >= 1.8.0 recommended) with png support enabled
  glib (>= 2.16.0)
  liboil (>= 0.3.6)
  Pangocairo (>= 1.16.0) - this is provided by Pango
  zlib (>= 1.1.4)

  GStreamer (>= 0.10.15 - optional, required for various audio and video formats)

  GTK+ (>= 2.8.0 - used by swfdec-gtk)
  libsoup (>= 2.4.0 - used by swfdec-gtk)
  ALSA (>= 1.0 - optional, required for sound output by swfdec-gtk)


