[Okular-devel] Multimedia and JavaScript-Support in Okular

[Oliver Sander]

Hi Albert, dear okular maintainers,
I recently decided to hire KDAB again to implement a few missing multimedia features
in Okular.  In particular, I wanted https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301607 done,
which concerns showing the poster images of movies inserted into a pdf using the
LaTeX movie15 package[1].  This makes use of the JavaScript API, which hasn't been
implemented yet.  Tobias had a look at it to estimate the price, and found that the
necessary API is fairly big, and that the JS code makes quite a few assumptions
about the viewer code, which only hold for the Adobe reader.  In his words, fixing
301607 would require large structural changes within okular, which are not worth
the effort (and, of course, too expensive for my budget).

I am writing this to you mainly for your information.  Unless those large structural
changes are what you guys had planned anyway (unlikely), bug 301607 will not get
implemented.  Also, according to Tobias, the same problem will reappear in many
cases where JS support is needed.  This means trouble, as there are probably more
important things relying on JS than my movie posters.

There is another reason why it may not be worth a lot of effort to implement full
movie15 support.  Movie15 claims that it is deprecated, and recommends that a third
alternative LaTeX multimedia package called 'media9' used instead:
http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/media9/doc/media9.pdf
This is a very powerful package, but it requires flash support to run (basically,
to show a movie, it embeds a small video player application written in flash into
the pdf file, and expects the viewer to run the flash app).  I have always thought
the idea a bit too outlandish to connect okular to a flash player, but maybe I am
too timid?  Tobias thinks that this may be feasible to do, if the API is well done.

What do you guys think?

Please cc me and Tobias if there should be a reply, we are both not on the list.

Cheers,
Oliver




[1] The advantage of movie15 over the similar 'multimedia' package is that movie15
allows to embed the movie file into the pdf file (and not just link to it).  That
way everything is in a single file, which is helpful when you need to change computers
really quick because you have found out on stage that your graphics driver does not
like the projector after all.

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